This program is an extension of the Primary Montessori learning methods on a more academic and product-oriented level. Continuing to take advantage of the mixed age learning environments, students pursue learning around individual interests in an environment rich with opportunities and experience. The elementary children are also grouped in mixed-age groups (Lower, ages six through nine; Upper, ages nine through twelve). The elementary program offers individualized instruction, which means that the child may work and be helped on an individual basis. Individualized learning establishes more exclusive contact between the child, the teacher, and the work. Our elementary programs operate from the understanding that an important challenge at this developmental stage is for children to discover their places in a group and within society as a whole. Thus, many of the activities at the elementary level take place in a group, with children sharing working together, and exploring materials together.
The program permits a variety of approaches using dynamic and colorful manipulative materials, which materialize abstract principles. These beautiful concrete materials are used throughout the entire curriculum including math, reading, grammar, writing, spelling, geography, history, and natural and physical science.
The elementary environment reflects a new stage of development and offers the following:
- Integration of the arts, sciences, geography, history, and language that evokes the imagination and abstraction of the elementary child
- Mathematics begins with concrete learning materials to understand basic concepts and moves to exploring more abstractly as the child's interests and abilities develop.
- Language serves as a foundation for much of what the child learns in all other areas; therefore, reading, writing, and oral expression are fundamentally important.
- The Great Lessons span the history of the universe from the Big Bang Theory of the origins of the solar system, earth, and life forms, to the emergence of human cultures.
Studies are integrated not only in terms of subject matter but in terms of moral learning as well, resultinng in appreciation and respect for life morals, empathy, and a fundamental belief in progress, the contribution of the individual, the universality of the human condition, and the meaning of true justice.