Our Children's House program for preschool and kindergarten is made up of four major areas: practical life exercises, sensorial activities, language development, and mathematics. Geography, geometry and the sciences are presented to the children as part of language development. Our classrooms are fully equipped with Montessori materials for guiding children in all these areas. A brief description of the major areas of the program follows.

These exercises link the child's home environment with the prepared environment of the classroom. They help the child learn controlled, precise fine motor skills and recognize the concepts of order and sequence. The child learns to concentrate and complete the work at her own uninterrupted pace and gains internal satisfaction of achievement. The materials also fulfill specific purposes in the real world for the child as she learns to button a shirt, tie shoe laces, wash her hands, and care for her own clothing and person without any adult help. The child also learns to care for his/her personal environment, in exercises such as dusting, washing and polishing furniture, and cleaning windows with a child-sized window wiper. In addition, practical life centers the child in a social atmosphere where "please" and "thank you" and a polite offer of "Do you need help with your work?" are the mainstays of conversation. The child is treated with respect and is therefore respectful.

These help the child’s development of senses. Colors, shapes, sounds, textures, dimensions, weight, temperature, tastes, smells, and gradation are some of the aspects of the environment to which the child is exposed. The child's perception and understanding of these phenomena are enhanced through repeated use of the materials in this area. These activities also enrich the child's vocabulary as each new experience provides new words.

The preschool child is immersed in the dynamics of his own language. Using sandpaper letters and simple alphabet cutouts, the child is able to effortlessly link sounds of letters with their shapes and written forms at a very young age. Readily available in the room are pictures, labels, and puzzles bearing the names of animals, plants, geometric figures, and countries of the world for the child to work with. These provide the basis for the enrichment of vocabulary. From the very beginning reading and writing are tied to culture.

The Montessori approach to mathematics is special for many reasons. All operations emerge from the concrete manipulation of "materialized abstractions" such as rods, beads, spindles, cubes, and cards. While there is variety, the different materials are highly integrated. By using different materials, the child is presented with several alternative approaches for learning a given concept. Materials are sequenced so that conditions for spontaneous mathematical discovery will always occur. The child usually retains better those concepts that he "figures out" on his own.

In addition to the above areas, our primary program also includes art, music, physical education and Spanish as a foreign language. These areas are integral parts of our main program and are presented through the prepared environment.