Primary and Elementary Program Descriptions

Italian pediatrician Maria Montessori developed the child-centered Montessori educational movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dr. Montessori found that children's innate drive to acquire and develop knowledge can best be cultivated by providing children with tools and manipulative materials for learning. The tools are tailored to particular stages of development which occur naturally in children around the world. Therefore, in a Montessori classroom, the teacher serves as guide, presenting a variety of materials and activities to students. As a professional educator, the teacher is also a student of the nature of children. The Montessori "guide" provides activities appropriate to children's needs, guiding students toward mastery of themselves and their environment.  The Montessori trained teacher uses a variety of tools to assess the progress of each individual child.

Children direct their own work by touching, manipulating, and experimenting with materials that are self-teaching and self-correcting. They develop physically, intellectually and socially. In the classroom, children are free to work independently or with others, to move about, to speak, to help others, and to seek help from adults or classmates. Dr. Montessori developed specific "Lessons of Grace and Courtesy," which appeal to children's interests in relationships and help them develop valuable social skills.

Primary Curriculum
Dr. Montessori found that children ages three to six years naturally direct their efforts to developing strength, and precision of body and mind. She created exercises of "Practical Life" such as washing, pouring, polishing, and folding, to give the children opportunities to focus themselves on worthwhile tasks while at the same time refining both coordination and concentration.

"Sensorial" exercises allow children to discover and internalize abstractions, such as dimension, color, sound, and shape.
Children's unconsciously absorbed language becomes conscious in the primary years. In the Montessori classroom, children work with carefully designed materials such as sandpaper and moveable letters that enhance their conscious exploration of spoken and written language.

The ingenious Montessori mathematical materials lead children to an understanding of the decimal system and arithmetic operations. Through mathematics, children's abilities to perceive and express precise relationships are developed.

As the children's intellectual capacities, attention spans and physical abilities increase, exercises in language, mathematics and all disciplines of human endeavor help them build skills and ideas which will allow them freedom to explore the larger world and join in the greater work of society.

Montessori primary classrooms are communities of children who are busily and happily engaged in purposeful, orderly and spontaneous activity.

Elementary Curriculum
Children ready for the elementary classroom turn outward to the world around them, ready for new horizons of research and discovery. They are full of questions and are ready to be inspired by stories, lessons and materials to seek answers to their questions through reason and imagination. Their questions drive the work of the classroom, with each endeavor developing new skills and raising new questions.

Working in partnerships and teams, the children share struggles and successes and learn to support, respect and depend upon one another. Together, they are capable of wonderfully complex tasks. Much of the work of the elementary class is accomplished through large projects, which require cooperation and planning, and facilitate the integration of different subjects, as well as the development of deeper understanding.

At this stage of development, children's goals are to further develop skills, to gain confidence, to confirm their own value, and to recognize the value of others. As maturity of spirit and mind develop, we see these children become young women and men ready to contribute their good share to the broad world.

Dual-Language
The conviction that learning more than one language is important for every child guides Casa Esperanza's commitment to a dual-language program. Language is not only a means to communicate and an instrument for thinking; it is also an important tool for understanding and appreciating the thoughts of others in our increasingly multicultural world. Knowing two languages is a marketable skill, thus expanding the individual child's later opportunities for constructive engagement with society.

There are cognitive benefits as well. According to Michael Rosanova, Ph.D., a professor of education at Chicago State University, a Montessori-certified teacher, and an expert on bilingual education,

Long term, children who have gone through an early childhood [dual-language] immersion experience show greater cognitive flexibility, greater facility in concept formation, greater creativity and problem-solving skills in verbal and math problems, and, obviously, a greater facility of vocabulary.

Learning a language, however, occurs most effectively and efficiently at a very early age -- young children are highly receptive to language acquisition, and second language learning comes most easily early on in a child's life. Students at Casa Esperanza Montessori are at the perfect age for dual-language learning.

Casa's dual-language program has been designed to create the environment, incentive, resources, and opportunity for monolingual English-speaking children to learn Spanish, for monolingual Spanish-speakers to learn English, and for children partly bi-lingual in both to balance and enhance their dual-language skills. To achieve this end, Casa's classrooms are facilitated by both a Spanish-only speaking Teacher/Assistant and an English-only speaking Teacher/Assistant. This means, of course, that throughout the day the children hear both Spanish and English. The method of daily exposure to and participation in both languages is a rapid and effective means of learning a new or less familiar language.

The dual-language program should not be confused with bilingual instruction. In bilingual programs, bilingual teachers and guides are available to respond to a child in whichever language the child is most comfortable. Used by itself, the bilingual approach limits exposure of a child to a new language while creating few incentives for learning it. In the dual-language program, the child is in fact educated in both languages by being exposed to two different languages in multiple contexts. It is quite possible for a child to effortlessly acquire two or more languages, and this can be done simultaneously without interfering with the learning process for either.

Dual-language education (also known in professional literature as two-way learning or dual-immersion) is growing throughout the United States.