A Typical Day

Ages 1 -3

Breakfast for those who get there early and have not yet eaten. Thereafter they do age appropriate exercises including colouring. Some of the exercises are:

All of these exercises help develop the child’s hand-eye-co-ordination, concentration, fine motor skills and listening skills. The children are taught to be independent in that they are encouraged to feed themselves, to use the toilet properly, to get their own lunches from their bags. This also builds self esteem as the children feel a sense of accomplishment.

10:00 am – They go out to play together with the grade 000. When they get back in, it is clean up time and meal time.

Ages 3 -4 (Grade 000)

Some children have their breakfast at school. Thereafter the teacher works with them. Exercises include:

Each child has to complete a colouring in picture – practice makes perfect. Thereafter they work the various Montessori materials. All of the exercises are designed to help improve a child’s fine motor skills, hand-eye co-ordination and concentration. They are also taught letter and number recognition. Letters are taught phonetically. Learning the months of the year, days of the week, colours, shapes, seasons, etc is also part of their curriculum.

10:00 am – Playtime.
10:30 am – Clean up and mealtime.
11:00 am Play dough, story time, music & movement.

Ages 4 -5 (Grade 00)

The first task for the day is to complete colouring a picture in their colouring books. Children are grouped according to their ability to grasp work with certain exercises and concepts. The children who are capable of working on their own are given tasks to complete while the teacher works individually with the children that are struggling and need help. Some of the exercises include:

All of these exercises are designed to help a learner with every aspect of learning. Our objectives are to improve a child’s hand/ eye co-ordination, fine motor skills and concentration. He/ She will also be introduced to simple addition and subtraction sums up to 10. They are also taught to identify three letter phonetic words, using pictures at first, thereafter the picture is removed & the child is required to read the words. He/ She is also taught to form these letters & write down the words. Cutting on a straight & curved line also plays an important role in helping the child improve his concentration and scissor control. Most of these children progress to Grade R with the ability to identify three words and some would have done four letter words, they would be able to cut neatly on a line, colour within the lines, can copy from the board, form numbers from memory, etc.

10:15 am – is circle time – The Good morning song is sung. Register is marked. Weather, date, days of the week, months of the year, seasons & relevant topics are discussed like Nelson Mandela’s Birthday, Spring Day, Olympics, significance of flags, etc. Thereafter is lunch and playtime. It is during this time that the children do their various extra curricular activities.
11:30 am – Inside Time – Children clean up and listen to a story.
12:15 am – Schools out

Ages 5 -6 (Grade R or Readiness)

The work done in readiness is a lot more intense. Here the children are taught to:

Children from the Readiness class graduate at the end of the year and go directly into Grade 1 into a school of their choice. All of these children do exceptionally well having received a solid foundation in education. Most of them have collected merit & principal awards from their respective Primary schools.