Toddler - Lakeside Montessori School

Toddler Curriculum

The Toddler program at Lakeside Montessori is taught by a certified Toddler Montessori Teacher along with two caring and qualified assistants. The classroom environment has been designed to be a very organized and child friendly space for our children to learn and develop in. The program is divided into five areas: Practical Life, Fine Motor, Language, Art and the Outdoors.

Practical Life

The Practical Life area of the classroom helps with coordination development of children by providing activities that encourage repetition.

Children are encouraged to develop orderly work habits through purposeful activities that have a logical sequence of actions. The classroom environment also provides an opportunity for social interaction, the formation and integration of personality, as well as mental, physical and emotional development.

Fine Motor

The Fine Motor Area refines the movement of the hand, the exercise and development of hand-eye coordination and refining the movement of fingers.

The materials in the classroom aid in the coordination of hands to give tactile and visual experience and stimulate various movements. Children are offered a number of variations for grasping objects and are encouraged through these exercises to increase their span of concentration.

Language

The Language Area encourages the children’s development of confidence through self expression. The materials in the classroom help enrich vocabulary as well as introduce and foster a love of books and knowledge.

Children learn name association, at first concretely with actual objects and later more abstractly with photos. The children are aided in sentence construction through both individual work activities and circle time to further their growth and independence.

Art

Art is more than expression – it is a way to form intelligence. It provides movement, control, organization, order and language development benefits. Art in the Toddler Montessori community is process oriented and does not focus on the end result.

We strive to create an environment in which the development of the children’s art can occur and their artwork is always respect and appreciated.

Outdoors

The outdoor environment provides an opportunity to use senses. It allows children to form a relationship with nature, enjoy it and take care of it.

Experiencing all of the things that nature has to offer – grass, water, mud, birds, looking at clouds, feeling rain drops on their face, watching trees sway in the wind – all of these things bring children closer to nature, the seasons and the cycle of life.