THIRD YEAR/ KINDERGARTEN
The Montessori Children’s House experience is designed by a three-year cycle of two years of preschool plus the kindergarten year.
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Children often learn more and better from peers who are just slightly older than them. As they grow and become a 2nd year, they begin to master more of the many skills and activities around the classroom. They can watch the new 1st years coming in, and start to help them! They start laying the foundations of language and math activities, learning and perfecting the component skills of writing, reading, and arithmetic.
The 3rd year is when it all comes together. It’s the year the child cashes in on all the work of the prior two years, where they put it all together in their development. Suddenly, they go from sounding out words to reading sentences. They get numbers and delight in doing arithmetic into the thousands. They can also draw pictures and write entire illustrated stories.
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Often, the 5- and 6-year-olds in the Children’s House naturally become teachers and mentors for their younger peers. The third year is often when the development of the second language takes off when children transition completely to speaking in Chinese or Japanese in class.
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New enrollment into AIM’s Children’s House program does require a three-year commitment from parents. Academic success, confidence and leadership, and second language mastery all make it very important that children stay at AIM for the full three-year Montessori cycle.