Day Care Preschool Sayreville

The general purpose of this area is to build upon the child’s innate  sense of order, to promote motor coordination, concentration and  independence. The activities in this area such as pouring, buttoning,  and cleaning increase their independence and encourage self-confidence.  At the same time, they are indirectly developing their fine motors  skills with lessons such as tweezing which will help when they begin to  write. They learn to care for themselves and their environment  initiating a sense of responsibility, respect and love of learning.

The purpose of the activities in this area is to educate the child’s  senses so that they can better understand the world around him. Using  the materials in this area the child will develop various senses  including visual discrimination and visual span which is important for  moving on to pre-reading exercises. They use their senses to learn about  specific concepts such as size and texture. Here they will discover the  difference between rough and smooth which will later be used when they  begin studying the sounds of the alphabet with the Sandpaper letters.

The world is grand but everything in our universe is interconnected.  If we don’t take care of our world, it will not take care of us. We are  all equal; we may have different customs and beliefs but inside we are  all the same. The Cultural area of the classroom introduces a child to  these very important ideas. It is divided into seven subjects:

• Geography
• History
• Botany
• Zoology
• Science
• Art
•  Music 

Most are incorporated into our circle activities. Beginning with the  whole, using a globe that has blue to represent water and grey, rough  material to represent the land, Maria Montessori’s cultural materials  introduce the child to the world and then to its parts. It introduces  the child to concepts such as taking care of our environment and others.  The Cultural area of the classroom gives the child facts to grow on.

The math materials progress from concrete to abstract. Unlike the  traditional way of teaching math in which memorization was the key to  doing math correctly, here math is first learned via the senses. This  makes math so much more interesting and far easier to comprehend. They  first learn and practice counting up to 10 and recognizing the numbers  and quantities. They use number rods, sandpaper numbers, number cards,  spindle box, cards and counters and more. Once they have become  proficient, they are introduced to the decimal system and they end up  learning to count eventually to 9,000. Using concrete materials like the  golden beads, short bead stair, operation boards and more, the children  learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Since they  understand it and math is entertaining to work with, they will be  confident with their math skills in the future.