Katy GT Academy

Our Mission

Here at KGTA Montessori, we strive to provide our children with a quality Montessori education. We provide all of the proven tools and methods developed by the doctor and perfected for the modern world. Through our educational programs, each child develops his or her self-esteem, self-discipline, motivation, independence, curiosity, cooperation, respect and concern for others.   

Our Philosophy

"From the moment the child enters the classroom, each step in his education is seen as a progressive building block, ultimately forming the whole person, in the emergence from childhood to adult. All focus is on the needs of the child."

One distinguishing feature of Montessori at the preschool age is that children direct their own learning, choosing among the sections of a well structured and stocked classroom, including Practical Life (fine and gross motor skills), Sensorial (senses and brain), Language, Mathematics, Geography, Science, and Art. The role of a teacher is to introduce children to materials and then remain a "silent presence"in the classroom.

What is Montessori?

 

Dr. Maria Montessori believed that education begins at birth and that the first years, being the most formative, are the most important. This system of education is both a philosophy of child growth and a rationale for guiding such growth. It is based on the child's developmental needs for freedom within limits, and a carefully prepared environment. The child develops by means of experiences in his environment. These experiences are called "work". The child has a deep love and need for purposeful work. He works, however, not as an adult for profit and completion of a job, but for sake of the activity itself. Many activities are offered which differ from those in traditional nursery schools. Exploration of ideas is encouraged from a concrete level to abstraction in an orderly way. A rich curriculum is provided with experiences in art, music, mathematics, science, language and practical life. Learning is individualized and the impulse for learning is the self-motivation that exists within each child.

 

What is the difference between Montessori and traditional education?

Montessori emphasizes learning through all five senses, not just through listening, watching, or reading. Children in Montessori classes learn at their own, individual pace and according to their own choice of activities from hundreds of possibilities. Learning is an exciting process of discovery, leading to concentration, motivation, self-discipline, and a love of learning. Montessori classes place children in three-year age groups (3-6, 6-9, 9-12, and so on), forming communities in which the older children spontaneously share their knowledge with the younger ones. Montessori represents an entirely different approach to education.

Are Montessori children successful later in life?

Research studies show that Montessori children are well prepared for later life academically, socially, and emotionally. In addition to scoring well on standardized tests, Montessori children are ranked above average on such criteria as following directions, turning in work on time, listening attentively, using basic skills, showing responsibility, asking provocative questions, showing enthusiasm for learning, and adapting to new situations.

 

At KGTA Montessori, what do you teach in the primary class?

At KGTA Montessori, we cover 5 areas in primay Curriculum:

 

Practical Life

This area is designed to help students develop a care for themselves, the environment, and each other. In the Primary years (3-6), children learn how to do things from pouring and scooping, using various kitchen utensils, washing dishes, shining objects, scrubbing tables, and cleaning up. They also learn how to dress themselves, tie their shoes, wash their hands, and other various self-care needs. They learn these through a wide variety of materials and activities. While caring for yourself and your environment is an important part of Montessori Practical Life education in these years, it also prepares the child for so much more. The activities build a child's concentration as well as being designed in many cases to prepare the child for writing. For the first three years of life, children absorb a sense of order in their environment. They learn how to act a certain way naturally by absorbing it. These ages, from 3-6, the children are learning how to both build their own order and discover, understand, and refine the order they already know. So it's typical for you to see a child spend a half hour working on one practical life activity with a strong concentration and attention to detail. Language preparation comes in many forms in the practical life area. In many languages, the setup is from left to right, top to bottom, in horizontal lines as much as possible to prepare the child for reading and writing. (Many countries, such as those that read and write Chinese, may adapt this to fit the way they write and read). Many of the fine motor skills being used involve a pencil grip and help the child develop that grip to be able to later use a pencil more easily.

Practical life in the elementary years and high school years involves many of the same skills, but also begins to take a bigger drive towards community service oriented activities.

 

Sensorial

All learning first comes to us through the senses. By isolating something that is being taught, the child can more easily focus on it. For example, colors are not taught by having the child think of everything that is blue - blue jeans, the sky, icebergs, a picture of a blue cartoon elephant hanging on a wall. Colors are taught with the color tablets. The color tablets are all exactly the same except for one thing - their color in the middle. This helps take away the confusion for the child and helps them to focus on specifically what blue is.

Exact phrasing of terms is important. An oval is not an "egg shape." A sphere is not a "ball." The Montessori method places great emphasis on using the correct terminology for what we see. This is readily apparent in the sensorial area.

The sensorial area also falls over into the math area quite regularly. The red rods in the sensorial area are a direct link to the segmented rods in math that teach 1-10. The pink tower has a connection to units and thousands that the child learns later in the 3-6 curriculum. Even the trinomial cube will be used in the elementary years to figure out complex mathematical formulas.

 

Cultural

This includes both the studies of the world and various cultures. Montessori children come out of a 3-6 environment not only understanding the concept of a continent, country, and state, but also the names of many countries around the world. Montessori uses colored maps to help the children remember continents, countries, and states.

More importantly, the goal is to get an understanding that there are various cultures and these cultures have a lot to offer us. When a student is doing the map of Asia, pictures, stories, facts about different Asian countries, and a variety of learning opportunities open up to give the child a real sense of the world and how it is different - even within the same area.

For the elementary years, a very in-depth cultural curriculum is implemented. Children begin to learn about the capital states and begin learning about governments. A focus on appreciating and enjoying other cultures is also a core part of the curriculum. A child may even take his interest in geography and expand it to a wide range of learning opportunities in other areas. For example, a child may decide to study the history of his city which might begin with early settlers. People may have settled in that area because it was near a river. This information may lead the child to include, in his study, the different natural life around the river and how that may have helped the early settlers. The growth rate of the area in different time periods may also be included and presented in the form of a graph. In one cultural lesson, the child therefore may include math, science, history, and geography in one study. This is just an example, but the possibilities of what a child takes interest in are endless. The teacher is there as a guide to help draw in different aspects for the child to look into and research, rather than having to be the source of all the information.

 

Science

Children at the early childhood age are very detail-oriented. They know what a bird is. Now they want to know the various body parts of a bird. They want to know the life cycle of different animals. They begin to really look at the parts of a plant and wonder, "What are those long things coming out of the middle of a flower?" The science curriculum takes the opportunity for the child's natural questioning and draws a curriculum for the 3-6 age range.

 

Language

The language curriculum in 3-6 involves everything from vocabulary development to writing to reading. Children learn their basic letter sounds through the use of sandpaper letters, where the letters are cut from sandpaper and glued to a wooden board. As the child traces the letter, they get a real image for how the letter feels. They can also feel if a mistake was made because of the different feel of the sandpaper from the board. They begin making words before they can read words with the moveable alphabet, a large box of cut out letters made from wood or plastic that the child can arrange on his or her rug.

A focus on grammar, story writing, and reports are in the elementary years. Grammar is taught with very hands-on materials. In a 6-9 classroom, the child learns about nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections. In the 9-12 classroom, a focus is also placed on learning gerunds, abstract nouns, and other more advanced grammar concepts.

An appreciation for literature is another strong point in the Montessori elementary curriculum.

 

Math

Children go from a very concrete understanding of math to a more abstract concept. For example, the difference between 1, 10, 100, and 1000 because they have felt it countless times. They felt it originally in the pink tower when they were 3 years old and later in the math materials. The idea of squares and cubes becomes concrete because of the use of the Montessori Bead Cabinet.

As stated above, the sensorial leads into the math area very well. A child who attended a 3-6 Montessori classroom will have likely worked with a material called the trinomial cube. After working with it in 3-6 for several years, then in a 6-9 classroom extensively, the student may be ready to take on another phase of the material. Rather than working with it as a sensorial material, by matching up colors and shapes, a 9 year old might be ready to use it to understand that: (a+b+c)³ = a³+3a²b+3a²c+b³+3ab²+3b²c+c³+3ac²+3bc²+6abc

The child can then work out the math equation to figure out the cube of a+b+c with different variables. This is just one example of how sensorial materials cross over into math.