SPECIAL PRE-ELEMENTARY MONTESSORI CLASS IN VIETNAM
AMIS Pre-Elementary class is the first special pre-elementary classroom in Vietnam that is open to focus on the academic, social and cognitive skills for children under the age of 5-6 years old. We would like to create a sustainable educational establishment offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory education at primary school.
As Dr. Montessori observed, children under the age of 5-6 years old are in a “sensitive period” for the development of independence, social interaction, language and math. Thus, Pre-Elementary class which is designed specifically to meet the needs of this age group provides the opportunity to develop positive group behaviors and explore their desire for independence. Besides, our curriculum also offers an academic focus on Math and Language together with the development of each child.
Language is treated with the utmost importance in the Montessori classroom. Teachers start with a phonics-based approach to learning the basics: sounds, vowels, and consonants. For children, this also means learning through sight words and sounding out sentences through consistent practice.
In Pre-Elementary Class, before we teach children to write, they trace the letters of the alphabet using sandpaper letters. This gives them a multisensory aspect and creates muscle memory for when they begin to write using a pencil. We then use a movable alphabet to help them learn to encode or spell. Meanwhile, students work on all kinds of activities to strengthen their hands and learn a proper pencil grip. One of the ways Montessori excels at introducing reading and writing to children is by focusing on proper penmanship. We regard this as so much more than just an everyday skill; we regard this as a life skill that goes hand-in-hand with literacy. In pre-elementary curriculum, we also teach children basic grammar, like parts of speech: adjective, article, noun, verb, adverb, preposition and conjunction.
Learning language and learning how to read happen concurrently in our class. Beyond helping children learn how to read, we focus on helping them understand why they should read in the true place. Our children are encouraged to read books every day to instill a love of learning, a sense of imagination, and a sense of pride. These readings are tailored to appropriate age, skill level, and interest. Our goal is to not only stimulate, but also satiate students’ expanding literary minds, so that they may learn to embrace reading as a both a practical skill set and an enjoyable activity that they can carry with them through life.
Like all Montessori classrooms, Mathematics materials in Pre-Elementary class are extensive, always beginning with the concrete towards abstract which allows a child continual challenge and growth in the area. Under the age of 5-6 years old, almost of our children have the good capacity to reason, calculate, and estimate. Thus, we keep improving their learning of operations and memorization.
Firstly, our children learn the decimal system by first gaining a firm understanding on quantity. We do this by presenting a variety of work, including beads and cubes to represent units. Students also learn to name individual categories, such as units, tens, hundreds, and thousands. The work students do in seeing, understanding, and handling the physical numbers themselves helps them show relationships between categories and visualize the sizes of these categories, and count categories. To support students understand how large numbers interact, we use a series of materials that become increasingly abstract over time until they use pencil and paper to solve.
The abstract work is presented when children have a firm comprehension of concepts. The work is focused on abstract ideas about how numbers behave, including calculating and memorizing and operation of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. There are many materials we use that repeat these concepts and invite a variety of other topics children are learning about at this age. Providing a child with the materials at precisely the right challenge level will enable the child to demonstrate his development to the teacher through his progress. Math itself is an abstract concept, but if these abstract concepts are put into a concrete material that the child can manipulate, they are able to learn those concepts at a much younger age, and have them stick with them for a long time. Thus, our children really love Math.
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