Practical life activities
Your child engages in tasks he/she naturally enjoys doing, such as pouring, sweeping, polishing, etc., while at the same time increasing muscular co-ordination, concentration, order and confidence.
Our program provides your child with the fundamentals for efficient learning in all important curriculum areas throughout their future education. To gain the most benefit, it is recommended that children attend the full 3-year program.
We strive to provide a high quality Montessori program that includes:
Sensorial Equipment
Our sensorial equipment helps your child to classify countless impressions in order to develop and refine sense perception. This understanding forms the basis for abstraction in thought in all other areas of the curriculum.
Language Development
Banksia prides itself on having a strong language program comprising of three essential components: a strong foundation in phonics, comprehension based on visualisation and learning to read using context clues.
Mathematics
Through our sensorial apparatus your child sees distinctions of distance, dimension, graduation, identity, similarity and sequence and will now be introduced to the functions and operations of numbers.
All activities at Banksia encourage natural and social development, independence, self-motivation, auditory and visual discrimination, self-discipline and decision making, concentration and focus, muscle development, co-ordination, a positive self-concept and a love of learning. By ensuring that the classroom environment is designed to be as accessible as possible for children to work in and everything has its place, children can be given the maximum freedom to move and develop.
Multi-Age Grouping
In a Montessori environment children of mixed ages and abilities are grouped in three year spans. Our school caters for a maximum of 28 three to six year olds in one big classroom. Many of the Montessori materials are self-correcting. This means your child has the opportunity, whilst working with the equipment, to recognise if the exercise was completed correctly or not. If not, he can try again, ask another child for help, or go to a teacher for suggestions. Children are challenged according to their ability and never bored.
Typical activities for pre-kindy and kindy children include sand paper letter and number tracing, sorting, stacking, pouring, painting, drawing, counting, matching objects, juicing oranges, peeling carrots, cutting, making puzzles, learning how to do and undo buttons, zippers, locks, etc. These are all ‘jobs’ children naturally like to do yet also play an important role in the development of fine motor skills, hand an eye coordination, concentration and self-confidence.
Older children will complete similar activities, but at an increasing level of difficulty. Often the same Montessori materials can be used in a different way according to the age and development of each individual child. A special set of ten blocks of graduated sizes called the pink tower for example, may be used just for stacking, combined with the brown stair for comparison, or used with construction paper to trace, cut, and make a paper design, or to study perspective and measurement.
Generally during a child’s fourth year, they are getting ready to read and write. When they draw pictures, they often include letters or words. They usually know all the sandpaper letters by then and are starting to make words with the movable alphabet. Next they start writing sentences. Maths, science, history, music, movement and arts are also important components of our classroom activities.
We strongly encourage parents as well as prospective to attend our Parent Information Nights. They are held once a term and each session explores a different topic: practical life and sensorial, language or maths. This is a great way to learn the Montessori approach to education and view first-hand what your child is up to in our classroom.