top of page
Infant Toddler Program

INFANT/TODDLER – 12 months to 36 months

 

The importance of the period from birth to age three cannot be underestimated, for this is the formative period for personality, trust, thinking, problem solving and independence. Your child is born with tremendous potentials and craves to learn, explore, and try new things! The heart of our infant/toddler curriculum is building your child’s self-esteem by providing a loving and nurturing environment that encourages you child’s development.



 

Our infant/toddler program here at Ladybird Montessori Learning Academy introduces the Montessori concepts and principles in order to help your child become independent and confident. Our facility provides a beautiful and stimulating environment that helps to enhance your child’s senses and make them feel at home. We have areas for sleeping, feeding, personal care and playtime. Our goal here at the Ladybird Montessori is to help your infant or toddler develop the following skills and be prepared for preschool:

Practical Life and Daily Living Skills

 

What does practical life mean? Practical life exercises your child to living a purposeful life by doing meaningful activities that imitates the real life. Practical life exercises embraces the care for self, care for the environment and courtesy. Exercises include:

 

  • Using the toilet with little adult help
  • Feeding him or herself with utensils and drinking from a lidless cup
  • Washing hands and face
  • Hanging coats or backpack on hooks
  • Wiping small spills

 

According to Dr. Maria Montessori, children are naturally curious about the activities they have witnessed in their early childhood. Our job at the Ladybird Montessori is to help your child fulfill that curiosity by demonstrating the task and having your child imitate it through repetition and order. The success in practical life activities also enhances your child’s motor skills, coordination, balance, and courtesy of their environment.

Language, Listening and Speaking Skills

 

The language area prepares the child for reading and writing as well as helping them to develop self-expression and new vocabulary. Dr. Maria Montessori states “to talk is in the nature of man,” that is, humans have the tendency to communicate with others. Because language is involved in the thinking process, the child needs to be spoken to and listened to often. The child will need to experience different modes of language and to hear or tell stories. Most importantly, the child needs to feel free and be encouraged to communicate with others. Activities to enhance language skills include:

 

  • Listens with intent to simple stories

  • Knows and practices how to use a book appropriately

  • Speaking in sentences

 

Math Skills

 

Math is all around the child at an early age such as counting up to how old you are. Mathematics, like language, is the product of human intellect. Young children are naturally attracted to the science and patterns of numbers. The infant and young child observes and experiences their world in a sensorial way. From this experience of math and arithmetic, the child abstracts concepts and qualities of the things in their environment and allows them to develop mental order. Arithmetic and math materials are sensorial materials, it deals with shapes, space, numbers and their relationships or attributes by the use of numbers or symbols.

 

Culture

 

Children are very curious about other places and people. In a Montessori classroom, the child learns about the world, its people, its animals, and its landscape. Our classroom environment provides materials to aid their curiosity about the world in which they live in, such as simple gloves, maps, flag charts, books and games. At Ladybird Montessori Learning Academy, people and families of different culture always surround us and we always encourage for families to share their cultural celebrations with their children.

 

Arts

 

Our classroom has many open-ended creative art materials for infants and toddlers to explore and play with different mediums. Although there is no set curriculum for art and creativity in the Montessori method, our materials help enhance children’s creativity and encourages them the freedom to explore.

 

Science

 

Children are natural observers. They are fascinated by the phenomenon found in the natural world and science is all around us. Young children interacts with the natural world everywhere they go such as investigating the flower they smell, how a leaf feels, or even what happens when you pull the cat by its tail. Through these experiences and simple experiments with the natural world, young child learn how things work and how to interact with it.

 

 

Social and Emotional Skills

 

From birth, children have already begun to develop a personality of their own. All infants develop this way through social relationships and experiences. Infants are born with the urge to relate to others and for others to relate to themselves. Emotions are a child’s first spontaneous expressions. They control the mother’s behaviour as well as establishing and maintaining significant relationships between them and their environment. By age three, a child learns to express gratitude, trust and respect for those who care and help them orient themselves in their world. If babies are treated with love and respect with their caretakers, without any violence or oppression, they will grow confident and acquire feelings of adequacy. Social and emotional exercises include:

 

  • Recognizing and saying the names of all students and adults in the classroom
  • Initiating interactions with other children
  • Usage of words to express their feelings
  • Showing signs of empathy and care
  • Co-operates in group situations
  • Waiting for their turns

 

With a prepared environment and freedom to act, the activities that young children are most enthusiastic about are those in which helps them further structure their personality. When a child is able to concentrate, doubt and timidity disappears. When a child learns to assimilate to their environment, their personality is unified and by learning new skills and knowledge, the child is no longer discontented.

Sensorial Skills

 

Sensorial and emotional skills are nothing new to a child. The purpose and aim of sensorial and emotional exercises is for the child to acquire clear, conscious information and to be able to make classifications in their environment. Through the child’s senses, the child studies his or her environment and becomes a ‘sensorial explorer’ as Dr. Montessori states. Sensorial practices include:

 

  • Recognizing and naming basic shapes

  • Matching simple pictures

  • Ordering objects according to sizes

  • Completing simple jigsaw puzzles

  • Identifying different types of smells, colours and sounds

  • And other visual discriminations

 

All sensorial materials are designed with the same ideas in mind:

 

  • All of the materials isolate one quality that is to be worked by the child. This allows the child to concentrate on a single quality.

  • All of the materials have a ‘control of error’ in which calls for the child to make corrections themselves.

  • All of the materials are esthetically pleasing. That is, like Practical Life materials or activities, it attracts the child’s attention and allows the child to manipulate the materials with ease.

  • All materials must be complete. That is, for the child to finish working with the entire piece of material without having to stop or have a missing piece.

  • All of the material is limited. This limitation refers to two things: having a limited quantity of the material and limited quality available. Limitation on having a single object allows the child to build patience and waiting for their turns. Limited quality, for example colours, refer to only a selected number of colours are to be available so that it peaks the child’s interest and curiosity.

  • Lastly, all materials are referred to as “materialized abstractions”, that is, abstract Montessori concepts are made into concrete materials.

 

 

bottom of page