KMSCHOOL CASA PROGRAM FOR 3 YEARS – 6 YEARS
CASA is a bright and beautiful prepared environment for whole-child development in the age group 3 years to 6 years. This vibrant environment is more of a children’s home than a typical classroom. The main areas in CASA are: practical life, sensorial, math, language and geography/nature. There is also a library, a kitchen, and washrooms.
Practical Life
This section is the most important area of the classroom as this is the first area to be practiced by the young child who just started in this class. Practical life activities are derived from “real life”, it is the day-to-day activities children see around them at home, such as pouring, washing laundry, ironing, polishing, scrubbing, baking and so on. Those activities make children feel like they belong, they do something meaningful and productive, they develop self-esteem and confidence as well as develop great practical skills, which brings them greater awareness. This area also prepares for math as reasoning and logic develops by doing those activities.
Sensorial
This area is specifically designed to develop all senses: visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, auditory and the complex senses. Each exercise works on the particular sense e.g. tasting bottles, where children match tastes only focuses on the gustatory sense, the pink tower only focuses on the visual sense and so on. Children learn from the touch, smell and so on and intimate work with the materials.
Language
This area offers variety of materials to help the child develop the love of reading books and writing. Children start off by working with classified cards, spoken language, they are exposed to a variety of rich vocabulary which is abundant in the classroom, children work with one another teaching each other words from art, to musical instruments to animals and countries. Later children learn sounds and sandpaper letters. The child traces the cursive sandpaper letter and says the sound the letter makes. Then comes the moveable alphabet and eventually actual writing. The hand and wrist already got great work out by using PL materials as well as sensorial. Metal insets are used to prepare the child for writing. By the time paper with lines is introduced the child developed the stamina to work with pencil for a long period of time. Writing comes easily and with joy. The language area goes step by step from simple to more difficult,, from sound to more sounds together to reading phonetic word to reading words with phonograms and so on till reading books and beyond.
Math
Montessori math goes from concrete to abstract. The child needs to recognize physically/visually the difference between numbers, e.g. 3 is smaller than 7 etc. The written symbols in math i.e. numbers are always introduced after the concrete recognition. Children are introduced to: numbers to ten, teens and tens, decimal system, simple fractions, formation of 4 digit numbers, simple operations – all with the help of specific materials.
