Enrichment Classes

Enrichment classes are included in the curriculum to enhance the child's cultural awareness.

Arts and Crafts Art strives to maintain the great joy the child finds creating something of his or her own. The children have the freedom to explore their imaginations in a variety of mediums used for expression. The importance of the process is stressed at this time, and not the end product.

Music The music curriculum at Montessori by the Sea is based on “Musicplay” a sequenced curriculum developed by Canadian music educator Denise Gagne. It incorporates Kodaly methodologies for musical development and meets the American National Standards of what students should know and be able to do in the arts at each grade level. The standards for music education are: 1. Singing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music. 2. Performing on instruments, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music. 3. Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments 4. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines 5. Reading and notating music 6. Listening to, analyzing, and describing music 7. Evaluating music and music performances 8. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts and disciplines outside the arts 9. Understanding music in relation to history and culture. Through active participation singing, moving, listening, reading, writing, creating and performing, students explore the fundamentals of music: beat & rhythm, melody, harmony, form, expression, and the cultural context of music.

French

Casa French

The curriculum is drawn both from the Scottish Education Topic Framework Package and teacher-made materials based on the needs of the students. At this age, most of the work involves listening to and speaking the language, using a variety of resources including, pictures, theme-related objects, books and cds. Singing songs, playing games and learning rhymes also helps the students to learn the language. The older Casa students have the opportunity to do some reading and writing.

Topics include: Calendar work, greetings, ages, family, numbers 1- 20, school objects, months, weather, food (grains, fruit and vegetables), colors, clothes, pets, and celebrations.

Where appropriate, activities are available for the children to work on in the classroom outside French class-time. The work is designed to help reinforce language already learned in the French class. These activities include matching small flashcards with objects and/or words, doing the French calendar, matching pictures on vocabulary dice with pictures.

Elementary French

The curriculum is set on a topic-based course, Metro, which is progressive and builds on language studied, as the children continue through the various elementary levels. The course contains activities in all four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). At this level, each child has his/her own workbook for further comprehension, and throughout the course, children will be able to hear spoken French (spoken by native speakers) on cassettes or CDs and model the language themselves. Other manipulatives, such as posters and the overhead projector are used to vary teaching learning styles.

Topics include: greetings, school objects, saying how old you are, saying when your birthday is, colors, French alphabet and spelling words and names in French, saying where you live, nationalities, talking about brothers and sisters, talking about pets, talking about what you look like, saying how tall you are and what you are like.

Written activities are provided for the children to work on in their classroom, outside French class. This work is designed to reinforce language already learned in French and that the students are able to work on independently.