Our Curriculum 

The Workcycle

The heart and soul of the Montessori child’s day is within what we call “the workcycle," an hourslong period of the morning where children receive individualized and small group lessons across the curriculum. Across the child’s full experience at Three Chairs  (the toddler years through their kindergarten year), personalized lessons are planned weekly based on the teacher's observations of the child’s interests and abilities. We move at the child’s pace, identifying their areas of growth, and bolstering them with creative lesson planning. If a child is ready for more academically complex than their age group typically meets, we follow them and provide that! Sophia, the Three Chairs teacher-leader, is Montessori trained through the lower elementary years. 

Children six and under learn through their senses and experiences, and the Montessori curriculum responds to this by providing hands-on materials and activities which children practice until they’ve fully understood a concept. At Three Chairs, we update and mold the traditional Montessori materials to ensure they are culturally responsive, gender-inclusive, and align with the experiences of today's children.

Children have free choice of what they choose to practice throughout the workcycle, and their interactions with these materials inform the teacher what to plan for them next. There is only one of each material available in the classroom, so children are also learning consideration: choosing a work, practicing it gently, cleaning it up so another child can use it, and then making another work choice. During the workcycle, children can also choose to prepare and eat their snack with a friend at the snack table, use the bathroom without asking a teacher, curl up with a book, or excersise their bodies on an indoor play structure. The workcycle is a buzzing and peaceful time of day! Our workcycle culminates in a daily circletime where we come together for cultural lessons, social skill learning, songs, dance, community games, and yoga.

We know children are learning and absorbing all the time–so the curriculum expands beyond the workcycle! At recess, we tend to our garden and hike up our hill, discovering all sorts of plants, bugs, and rocks along the way. At lunchtime, children set the table and listen to a book together, naptime provides practice for mindful quiet and calm. Children practice independent exercises throughout the day: changing their shoes, keeping our classroom beautiful and learning to  advocate for their needs.

The Montessori Curriculum

The work of the primary child is to understand that they themselves can make a meaningful impact on their community. This understanding is reached by engaging deeply with all five areas of our curriculum.

Practical Life: Practical life is the core of the Primary curriculum. These are exercises that explicitly teach necessary skills, and give children time and patient practice to feel competent, and therefore confident, in daily life. Examples stretch from learning to wipe their own nose, to offering a cup of tea to a friend, to stating a personal need clearly. Practical life covers self-care lessons, such as dressing oneself, environmental care, such as watering a plant, social skills, such as inviting a friend to play, and fine & gross motor skills, such as maneuvering small objects with hands or tools or carrying a heavy chair .Children practice all aspects of food preparation: peeling, chopping, scrubbing, mincing, washing dishes, etc. One of the most important skills we hope children will leave Three Chairs with is in honing their concentration, which is nurtured through practical life exercises. Learning to sew a button takes perseverance and focus, and when those two meld, pride is born! Practical life lessons expand and interlock with four other curricular spheres: sensorial, language, math, and cultural. 

Sensorial: Sensorial materials continue to form a strong foundation for mathematical understanding. As children further organize, understand, and refine their senses, they grasp a stronger hold on the world around them. Children six and under are concrete and sensorial learners, and the teacher’s job at Three Chairs is to provide children with a secure, rich, and intricate trust in our world.

 Language: Primary children are in a massive sensitive period (time of life where they are most susceptible to learning a new skill) for language. For the youngest children, early literacy and writing are embedded into our practical life curriculum, for example, learning to hold transfer water with a spoon teaches the needed hand formations to control a pencil.. Children practice phonological awareness, letter sounds and symbols, writing, reading, grammar, and word study with hands-on materials and real life experiences. Language learning is entwined with social skill learning, which we practice daily at circletime. This can often take the form of what we call "Grace & Courtesies," the explicit teaching of appropriate, kind, and thoughtful interactions. This may look like practicing how to ask for space, how to give & receive compliments, or how to correct someone on your name's pronunciation.

Math: The primary math curriculum is grounded in concrete, tactile learning. Children learn numeral to quantity association, linear counting, and then are introduced to the decimal system, as well as mathematical operations: addition, multiplication, subtraction, division (even six year olds can be capable of division!) All of these concepts are taught with physical, manipulative materials, so the young children have a grounded understanding of what these all mean!

Cultural: The cultural and science curriculums rotate over the course of the three years children remain in the primary classroom. We cover: anatomy, botany, zoology, astronomy, geology, and physical science. We rotate through a continent study each semester, learning both the geography of and cultural practices present in each continent. We will learn songs, cook recipes together, and make art inspired by craft traditions. We will also study land and water forms and political geography (states, countries, capitals.) Family participation is important at Three Chairs, and we invite loved ones in to share their favorite foods, holidays, and traditions with us at circletime.