The Casa Program at Mildenhall Montessori offers young children a friendly and inclusive environment that promotes discovery, self initiation, and concentration. The activities available to the children are intentionally designed to build skills and understanding through exploration, repetition, and practice.
Guidance is provided to individual and small groups of children by experienced teachers and assistants. Through mindful speech and deliberate physical movement the teacher and assistant clearly demonstrate expected classroom and interpersonal behaviours.
Your child selects her activity, prepares her workspace, and completes the lesson at her own pace, moving on only when she is ready. Developmentally appropriate tasks and activities allow your child to explore properties of size, quantity, volume, weight, and proportion. Other tasks build recognition of letters, sounds, and language. Still others build fine and large motor skills.
All activities have built in opportunity for social interaction, care of self and others, and care of physical space. Lengthy work cycles enable children to make independent choices about activities and develop and experience deep concentration. Through success they build confidence and self esteem. Through sharing with peers they build leadership and collaboration skills.
Children are intensely interested in purposeful activity, and through real activity such as pouring, polishing, preparing food, sweeping, and washing the children learn to care for themselves, for the environment and for others.
Young children engage all their senses to make order of the world. For example, by using prepared materials that are designed to appeal to a child’s desire to touch, manipulate, and move, children develop perceptions of size, space, and volume. This is the foundation for an understanding of geometry, mathematical concepts, and physics.
Inspired by the presented materials, basic skills in writing and reading are developed allowing children to link sounds and letter symbols. Effortlessly the child progresses to expressing their thoughts through writing and experiencing the world through reading.
At this stage of development, children are concrete thinkers who are establishing order on the world. Again, specialized materials are designed to appeal and support understanding of concepts such as quantity and patterns. Using these materials, even the young child works with concepts of operations, squares and cubes, fractions, and geometry.
Initiated by the child’s own curiosity, the cultural domain of the classroom introduces individuals and small groups to geography, botany, zoology, science, art, and history.
35 Ourland Avenue, Toronto, Ontario
416.259.2822
39 Spadina Road, Toronto, Ontario
416.413.9493
35 High Park Gardens, Toronto, Ontario
416.763.6097
Mildenhall Montessori Schools