Montessori Preschool / Child Care in Los Angeles, CA

Sage Garden Montessori:
Sage Garden Montessori is a small home-based Child Care and Pre School Program located in south-west LA near Westchester, Culver City, Inglewood, and Mid City. Our mission at Sage Garden Montessori is to create a safe and loving environment for your children.

Montessori Program:  We provide an integrated curriculum which enhances your child's curiosity about their world. We believe that children learn by doing. It is through active participation that children come to discover their talents and responsibilities. It is through friendship and community that children take their place in the family, the larger community, and the world. Our curriculum includes child-centred learning in the following areas:

-Practical Life: This area is designed to help students develop and care for themselves, the environment, and each other. In the Primary years (ages 3–6), children learn how to do things such as: pouring and scooping, using kitchen utensils, washing dishes, polishing objects, scrubbing tables, and cleaning up. They also learn how to dress themselves, tie their shoes, wash their hands, and other self-care practices. They learn these practical skills through a wide variety of materials and activities.

- Sensorial: All learning first comes through the senses. By isolating something that is being taught, the child can more easily focus on it. There are many different sensorial materials designed to help the child refine the tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory senses. For example, colors are taught with color tablets. The color tablets are all alike, except for one detail — the color in the middle. It helps avoid confusion for the child, and helps him and her focus specifically on: What is “blue”?

- Cultural: This includes studies of the world and other cultures. Montessori children achieve early understanding of the concepts of continent, country, and state, and the names of many countries of the world. Montessori method schooling implements include colored maps and flags, to assist the children in remembering continents, countries, and states. More important, the goal is acquiring an understanding of the world’s other cultures and what they offer.

- Science: The science curriculum takes advantage of the child’s natural questioning and draws a curriculum for the 3–6 age range. Early-childhood age children are very detail-oriented. They know what a bird is. At that age, they want to know the body parts of a bird. They want to know the life cycles of different animals. They begin to observe the parts of a plant, and ask: What are those long things coming out the middle of a flower?

- Language: The language curriculum, especially in the early years, includes everything — from vocabulary development to writing to reading. Children learn basic letter-sounds through the use of sandpaper letters. These are materials where the letters are cut from sandpaper and glued to a colored wooden board. The child’s tracing the letter implements tactile learning of how the letter feels. The children can also feel if a mistake was made, because of the different texture of the sandpaper from the wooden board. The colors represent the types of the letters such as blue for a vowel. They begin constructing words with a moveable alphabet of wood or plastic letters, before they can actually read words.

- Mathematics: Children go from a concrete understanding of mathematics to an abstract understanding of mathematics via mathematical concepts. For example, telling the difference between 1, 10, 100, and 1000, because they have felt it many times. Originally, they felt it in the pink tower, when they were three-year-olds, and, later, in the mathematics materials. The concepts of squares and cubes become concrete in their use of the Montessori Bead Cabinet.