Literacy & Numeracy

Education is not something which the teacher does, but a natural process that develops spontaneously in the human being.

Maria Montessori

Literacy

Our cosy book corner is a strong feature of our nurturing environment, giving children a space for quiet reflection, time alone with a book or a place to sit quietly with friends.

Teachers also often read stories to and with the children. The basis for reading is formed, when a child sees people around them reading and doing it with pleasure. Children love to be talked to and listening to stories.

Reading aloud to children can help them explore new facts, acquire the right word pronunciation as well as get introduced to vocabulary that not always come up in day-to-day conversations.

We build further literacy skills through sound games with objects, such as I spy using the phonetic alphabet. We often sing nursery rhymes in groups or social circles to help develop rhythm and rhyme.

Further activities such as the large moveable alphabet and sandpaper letters encourage children to recognise letters and their sounds and then enable them to start word building independently.

Numeracy

Montessori maths materials help children approach math with hands-on, visual, and physical learning aids. These visual materials offer a foundation of solid understanding of quantity before moving onto the more abstract concepts.

We explore less and more. For example, understanding that two conkers is less than three conkers, and that four is more than three etc. We explore symbols, patterns and counting in all areas of our classroom.

Shapes are explore as physical 3D wooden materials before moving to 2D shapes.

Many activities introducing maths are designed to be done collaboratively; for example, practising addition by setting up a shop and a bank with the activity centred on role-play.

Through the red rods and golden beads we introduce the concept of units and tens and thousands.