To help our Parent Community for our oldest classrooms, we shared the below information with Preschool Parents. This is a sample of the type of interactions you will get with admin and staff at EMM.

Montessori Areas

In a Montessori Primary classroom, there are five core areas of focus, based on the philosophy of Maria Montessori:

Practical Life

These activities help children develop independence, coordination, concentration, and responsibility.

Examples:

Pouring, spooning, transferring

Dressing frames (buttoning, zipping, tying)

Cleaning, sweeping, polishing

Grace & courtesy lessons

Purpose: Builds self-confidence and prepares the hand and mind for academic work.

Sensorial

Materials refine and develop the five senses, helping children classify and understand their environment.

Examples:

Pink Tower

Brown Stair

Color Tablets

Sound Cylinders

Knobbed Cylinders

Purpose: Develops discrimination of size, shape, color, texture, sound, weight, and dimension — laying groundwork for math and language.

Language (English/Spanish)

Focuses on spoken language, phonemic awareness, reading, and writing.

Examples:

Sandpaper Letters

Moveable Alphabet

Object-to-picture matching

Phonetic reading materials

Purpose: Moves from sound recognition → writing → reading in a natural developmental sequence.

Mathematics

Concrete materials introduce abstract math concepts.

Examples:

Number Rods

Spindle Boxes

Golden Beads (decimal system)

Teen and Ten Boards

Purpose: Develops number sense, quantity recognition, place value, and early operations through hands-on learning.

Cultural Studies

Introduces children to the world and their place in it.

Includes:

Geography

Science

Botany

Zoology

History

Art & Music

Daffodil Classroom

The classroom runs on a 3-year cycle / age group. The philosophy in these classrooms is:what a 3-year-old starts, a 4-year-old deepens, and a 5-year-old masters.

The specific ways this will be approached will be defined by the Montessori Lead and how he / she lays out the shelves, but parents can envision more detail based on the age and ability of the child. 

Practical Life:

At 3: A child practices basic self-care and care of the environment: putting on shoes, simple pouring, sweeping, helping water plants.

At 4: The same child now does multi-step tasks: setting tables, preparing snacks (spreading, slicing soft fruit), washing dishes, and taking responsibility for a classroom job.

At 5: They coordinate and lead: organizing snacks for a group, giving a younger child a pouring lesson, or planning and executing a full cleaning sequence for a shelf or table.

Sensorial

At 3: Children use materials like the Pink Tower and Color Tablets simply to build and match, refining size, shape, and color perception.

At 4: They start grading and comparing (smallest to largest, lightest to darkest), building more complex towers and patterns and using language like “thicker/thinner.”

At 5: They use sensorial foundations to support math and geometry: recognizing patterns, classifying shapes, and linking sensorial work to symbols (e.g., geometric solids vocabulary).

Math:

At 3: Matching quantities and numerals 1–10 with number rods and spindle boxes; lots of counting concrete objects.

At 4: Extending to teens and tens, building numbers with bead materials, and simple operations (addition/subtraction) with concrete beads.

At 5: Using golden beads and stamp games to perform multi-digit operations, sometimes into the thousands, and beginning to understand place value abstractly.

Culture, Science, and Community

At 3: Simple naming and classification: parts of a plant, animal names, basic land/water forms, songs about continents. (About half of the Daffodils are here).

At 4: Early experiments and projects: caring for classroom plants, simple science demonstrations, more detailed puzzle maps with continent/country names. (The other half of Daffodils are here).

At 5: Bigger-picture work: research projects with picture references, timelines, maps with labels, and acting as a guide for younger peers in these areas. No Daffodils are here

Learning Style: Montessori || Traditional Public School

Child-led, self-chosen work cycles (2.5-3 hrs uninterrupted) || Teacher-directed small/large groups, project-based play

Sensorial/math/language via concrete materials || Social-emotional and cognitive via exploration

Teacher observes and guides || Teacher is active facilitator

We prepare students who will move into traditional settings by incorporating the following into the Montessori day:

1. Circle

2. Structure

3. Rest

4. Specialists (enrichment)

5. Group projects