Primary Montessori Programs
Our Primary Montessori Programs serve children ages 3, 4, and 5 years old. The Primary, usually the first Montessori experience for your child, opens up a world specially built to meet the young child’s interests and help her or him discover the world.Primary Program Schedule Options
Choose the school schedule that’s right for your child based on his or her age and needs.9-Month Schedule (August – June, 5 days a week)
Primary Half Day, ages 3-4 (8:30 a.m. – noon)
Primary Full Day, ages 3-5 (8:30 a.m. – 2:50 p.m.)12-Month Schedule (All Day/All Year Program)*
Primary Full Day, ages 3-5 (8:30 a.m. – 2:50 p.m.)
Primary Full Day, Extended Hours, ages 3-5 (7:15 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.)
Primary Overview: A Fascinating Time of Discovery
During the ages of three, four, and five, your child absorbs information effortlessly. That’s why the Primary classrooms at Mountain Shadows are filled with an array of colorful, exciting, and stimulating Montessori materials. Children in the primary classes are encouraged to move, touch and explore their classroom. This carefully prepared environment encourages discovery and fosters your child’s development of independence, concentration, sequential thought, and controlled physical movement.
We encourage sensory development, introduce math and language concepts, and help the children develop practical skills they need in everyday life. We enrich this curriculum with an assortment of cultural explorations.
- Sensorial materials in each classroom clarify and refine the five senses. Sensory experiences include, for example, color matching, placing cubes in order of size, organizing items by weight, grading items by touch. This refinement helps children make finer distinctions and sharpens their perceptual skills.
- Mathematics exploration uses real objects to demonstrate abstract ideas. This means your child will learn not only counting, but also how many are 5 or 6, what numbers are even and odd, and at later stages, what it means to subtract or divide. The mathematical concepts built at this level help your child make sense of the world of numbers.
- Language in the Primary classroom is more than just learning to read and write. Language is an investigation of our cultural world, defining our particular sounds, letters, vocabulary, and usage. We learn vocabularies of animal and plant names and how words function in our speech. Of course, your child will also analyze sounds in our speech, match those sounds to letters, and eventually use the letters to compose words and sentences using special movable alphabets.
- Practical Life activities develop independence and self-direction. Pouring, sweeping, folding, buttoning—with these works children learn to become more independent and feel proud that they can do things for themselves. Children learn to say “excuse me” and “thank you” and to make requests politely. Classroom maintenance becomes, by and large, the children’s responsibility as they put materials away and care for plants and animals.
- Cultural Experiences include Art, Music, Geography, and the beginnings of History, Botany, and Zoology. These areas of study help children orient themselves in the world around them. Art, music, movement, and a variety of cultural activities are an integral part of this joyful learning experience.
Every day your child will discover new creative expressions in a classroom of mixed-age children, learning from and teaching each other.
deep love of learning. The way they teach there—sensorially and experientially—makes a
big difference. My kids make smart choices and
are learning to better themselves and empower themselves. It’s a beautiful thing.”
—Tiffany, mother of 7- and 4-year old
Mountain Shadows Montessori students