Practical Life
Children instinctively seek to care for themselves, their homes, and their natural environments. They want to feed themselves, sweep the floor, rake leaves, and pour milk into their cup. What Dr. Montessori called “practical life” is a valuable component of the Redondo Beach Preschool program. Children practice simple dressing exercises, such as cutting fruits and peeling vegetables. They help prepare and serve the morning snack. They plant and tend vegetables and flowers in the school’s garden, water and care for the class plants, and arrange fresh flowers. Through these activities, children develop coordination as well as self-reliance.

Sensorial Awareness
Sensorial materials isolate a defining quality such as color, weight, shape, texture, sound, temperature, or smell, encouraging children to distinguish, organize and describe their experiences and impressions.

Mathematics
Montessori math materials enable children to understand concepts through concrete explorations. Once the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are familiar, the child is ready to work with fractions, elements of geometry and algebra, and problem solving on paper.

Language Arts
A phonetic approach to reading begins with sandpaper letters to identify sounds and shapes and to trace letters, training the muscles needed for writing. With the movable alphabet, children construct words, phrases, sentences, and stories in preparation for written expression.

Culture
Cultural exercises expose the child to geography, history, physical science, and life science basics. The children gain an awareness of the world around them by exploring other countries, their customs, foods, languages, and wildlife. Through multicultural studies, we lay a foundation of mutual understanding and tolerance. Music, art, foreign languages, and physical education are part of the integrated cultural curriculum.