Our Offered Programs
From infant to elementary, we offer a variety of programs to help your child learn and grow to their fullest potential.
Winter Haven Montessori offers numerous programs for multiple age groups ranging from 3 months old to 5th grade.
Infant Room
Winter Haven Montessori's Infant Room is for children age 3 months to 1 year. This environment is a peaceful and safe place for our youngest children. With opportunities to develop movement and language and cultivate their natural passion for exploration and discovery.
Toddler Room
Winter Haven Montessori's Toddler Room is for children between 1 year to 2 years of age. This is a supportive space where materials and activities are utilized to develop independence, social skills, and maximize their natural curiosity and love for learning.
Primary Room
Winter Haven Montessori's Primary Rooms are for children between 2 years to 4 years of age. This classroom safely supports exploration and expression, building independence and developing confidence. Activities promote order, concentration, and self-care and supports intellectual and cognitive development.
Kindergarten
Winter Haven Montessori's Kindergarten classroom is for children between 5 years of age. This environment utilizes hands on materials and activities to develop practical skills, senses, and a passion for music, art and culture. This is a math and language rich environment, where students enjoy using our Montessori lessons to learn to read, write, multiply and divide.
Elementary
Winter Haven Montessori's Elementary classrooms are for children in 1st through 5th grade. Our mixed-age environment builds on language, mathematics, history, science, the arts, and more. Lessons are presented in small groups, and followed by independent work. This method explores the students interest and builds personal responsibility.
The Montessori Method.
The Montessori method involves a curriculum of learning that comes from the child's own natural inner guidance and expresses itself in outward behavior as the child's various individual interests are at work. Supporting this inner plan of nature, the method provides a range of materials to stimulate the child's interest through self-directed activity. In the first plane of development (0-6), these materials are generally organized into five basic categories: practical life, sensorial, math, language, and culture.
Practical Life
Practical life materials and exercises respond to the young child's natural interests to develop physical coordination, care of self and care of the environment. Specific materials, for example, provide opportunities for self-help dressing activities, using various devices to practice buttoning, bow tying, and lacing. Other practical life materials include pouring, scooping and sorting activities, as well as washing a table and food preparation to develop hand-eye coordination. These activities also provide a useful opportunity for children to concentrate bringing about their normalization. Other practical life activities include lessons in polite manners, such as folding hands, sitting in a chair, walking on a line.
Sensorial
The sensorial materials provide a range of activities and exercises for children to experience the natural order of the physical environment, including such attributes as size, color, shape and dimension. Many of these materials were originally suggested and developed by Seguin in his prior research with scientific education.
Examples of these materials are pink tower (series of ten sequential cubes, varying in volume); knobbed cylinders (wooden blocks with 10 depressions to fit variable sized cylinders); broad stairs (ten wooden blocks, sequentially varying in two dimensions); color tablets (colored objects for matching pairs or grading shapes of color).
Mathematics
In this area, materials are provided to show such basic concepts as numeration, place value, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. For numeration, there is a set of ten rods, with segments colored red and blue and “spindle boxes”, which consist of placing sets of objects in groups, 1-10, into separate compartments. For learning the numeral symbols, there is a set of sandpaper numerals, 1-9. For learning addition, subtraction, and place value, materials provide decimal representation of 1, 10, 100, etc., in various shapes made of beads, plastic, or wood. Beyond the basic math materials, there are materials to show the concept of fraction, geometrical relationships and algebra, such as the binomial and trinomial theorems.
Language
In the first plane of development (0-6), the Montessori language materials provide experiences to develop use of a writing instrument and the basic skills of reading a written language. For writing skill development, the metal insets provide essential exercises to guide the child's hand in following different outline shapes while using a pencil or pen. For reading, a set of individual letters, commonly known as sandpaper letters, provide the basic means for associating the individual letter symbols with their corresponding phonetic sounds. Displaying several letters, a lesson, known as the Seguin three-period lesson, guides children to learn the letter sounds, which finally blend together to make certain simple phonetic words like “up” and “cat”. The aim of these nomenclature lessons is to show the child that letters make sounds, which can be blended together to make words. For children over six, Montessori language materials have been developed to help children learn grammar, including parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections.
Cultural Subjects
The Montessori classroom may also include other materials and resources to learn cultural subjects, such as geography (map puzzles, globes), and science, such as biology in naming and organizing plants and animals. Music and art are also commonly involved with children in various ways. After the age of approximately six, learning resources include reading books and more abstract materials for learning a broad range of advanced subject matter.