Toddler Program.
The Toddler phase of development ranges from 18 - 36 months. These are a person’s formative years that begin building the foundation of a person’s long term character. According to the observations of Dr. Maria Montessori, a toddler has a particular aptitude for acquiring specific skills and habits. The curious mind of a toddler is ready to take up new information from the world around them. Our school provides appropriate environments for the holistic development of each child during this sensitive period of growth and learning.
Our Toddler classrooms are designed to emulate the comforting and safe feelings of the home environment. Each room is prepared with specific areas for food preparation, eating, toileting, individual activities, and group activities, the shelves are organized with developmentally appropriate materials, and students are provided with a multitude of communication opportunities.
Exploration under personalized care and attention.
Our school provides Toddler Programs with positive, supportive, and caring environments. The educators follow each students unique learning pace with a non-competitive outlook, giving the little scientists time to adjust or excel. The Toddler classrooms maintain a low teacher-child ratio of 1:6. The Montessori materials and even the furniture are designed especially for the toddler size, stages of development and learning needs. Our educators often create materials geared towards specific students to encourage learning and exploration or to support unique learning styles in certain curriculum areas such as math, language, and culture.
Sensitive periods for learning
The toddler stage is characterized by the continuous attempts to pick up the language they hear most frequently. In our toddler classroom, we create an atmosphere of attractive linguistic stimulants that boosts your child's vocabulary. Their language skills are further enhanced with conversations, poems, songs, listening to stories, name and classification of objects, and various other techniques.
The older toddlers are gradually introduced to phonetics with the help of a variety of games, including identifying and repeating the initial sounds of different words. It is an advanced skill that is taught generally in Kindergarten as a foundation of language development.
An environment that gives a sense of familiarity, clarity, and orderliness
During her lifetime, Dr. Montessori had deeply observed various challenges in child behavior and provided insights. We strive to incorporate her guidance in our various Montessori Programs. She believed that a child's uncontrollable emotions arose from the frustration from lack of ability to accomplish tasks independently. The cause of this is derived mainly from the environment not meeting the child’s needs. All of our classrooms are designed with this in mind. Maria Montessori developed special materials that follow a very specific sequence that isolates a single skill. Each subsequent material or “work” builds upon the previous skill learned. The child is encouraged to fully master one skill at a time and in sequential order.
Skills for Independence
Order
When Maria Montessori developed her materials, she created each material to isolate the development of a single skill. Each subsequent material or “work” builds upon the previous skill learned. The child is encouraged to fully master one skill at a time and in sequential order.
Language Development
The toddler stage is characterized by the continuous attempts to pick up the language they hear most frequently. In our toddler classroom, we create an atmosphere of attractive linguistic stimulants that boosts your child's vocabulary. Their language skills are further enhanced with conversations, poems, songs, listening to stories, name and classification of objects, and various other techniques.
Grace and Courtesy
Students socially interact with the world for the first time at the toddler stage. With this, our educators aim to support the development of a strong foundation for your child’s social life, guiding them through exercises and experiences that teach them how to peacefully coexist with others. Teachers utilize every day interactions as teachable moments such as learning to share, hanging jackets up, and using words to communicate emotions to reach the primary goal of your child learning to be a proactive participant in the world. Our teachers model the ideal behavior, social skills, and positive habits that your child aims to learn.
Sensorial Exploration
Numerous sensorially engaging activities and materials have been carefully designed to support the coordination of fine motor development of a child such as hand-eye coordination. Some activities in our toddler program include bead stringing, puzzles, sorting gradient sizes, and balancing items that vary in size.
Movement
At this phase students are focused on refining and advancing the fine and gross motor skills they recently learned in infancy as well as gaining a better sense of spacial awareness. Our educators build upon these skills with engaging group activities that include various music and movement combinations that support important social skills as well as gross motor development that improves balance, equilibrium, and enhance the movement of large muscles.
Freedom within Limits
Our students have the freedom to practice any task as many times as they desire! Students are discouraged from moving onto a more advanced exercise/extension until they have mastered the previous one in the sequence. For example, a child must first master how to grasp and transfer items with their whole hand before they can use a utensil such as tongs to accomplish the same task.
More Than Day Care.
Why should you choose a Montessori School for your toddler in place of a regular daycare center? There are numerous advantages of sending your child to our Montessori Toddler Program.
- With positive Toilet Training in the Montessori Method, a child is more likely to smoothly pass from the diaper stage to the 'going to the toilet' stage quickly. Do not miss out on our Newsletter! You can sign up for it here to get information on how toilet training is done gently and positively.
- While your toddler is learning to accomplish tasks independently, they become more eager to complete daily responsibilities such as dressing themself, picking up their belongings, and helping around the house with age appropriate chores.
- A Montessori child learns how to engage creatively and explore concepts and ideas through imaginative play.
- With a lot of attention to language acquisition skills in the Montessori Method, toddlers quickly enhance their vocabulary, paving the way for more effective communications.
Expert trained Montessori Educators
Staff members are dedicated to providing developmentally appropriate environments for children. We believe that teaching toddlers is not a job but a career committed to providing quality care and education to our most passionate learners. It is a requirement that our lead toddler teachers have completed the AMI Assistant to Infancy training.
