In a traditional Montessori classroom, you will find 5 clearly defined areas of study. There is Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Math, and Culture Studies.
The Practical Life section lays the foundation for all other work to be completed in the classroom. The activities are everyday tasks that a child needs to learn to master the care of self and care of the environment. Such activities include pouring, sweeping and tying, as well as grace and courtesy. The activities are presented to the child in such a way that concentration, coordination, independence, and order are developed.
The goal of the Sensorial section is to educate the child's senses. The curriculum area contains Montessori-specific materials that help the child refine his/her experience of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In addition, the materials of this section are modelled on scientifically-based concepts, such as metric system dimensions or algebraic formulas.
The Montessori Language curriculum begins with The Sandpaper Letters. These cards upon which the single letters of the alphabet are mounted on sandpaper, help to develop the child's reading and writing skills. These cards develop the child's pronunciation of letters and sounds. The exercises of reading and writing start with the vowels and then introduce consonants, creating a sound as we join these letters together. The child learns to associate the sounds of a letter with it's shape, through touch and through repetition of the sounds during or after the lesson. Word construction soon follows, and then introductory reading and writing exercises.
Mathematics in the Montessori classroom can be separated into a few major categories: beginning counting, advanced counting, the decimal system, and the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Concepts are presented in a very concrete way so that the children are not only able to count, but associate numerical symbols with loose quantities, skip count, and work with numbers in the thousands. Once the child has a firm foundation in all 4 operations, memorization of facts is introduced.
The topic of Culture Studies integrates and emphasizes a region's geography, history, music, art, etc.. The children study different areas of the world, and study concrete examples of that area's language, literature, dress, food etc.. in both past and present. This increasingly important area introduces the child to our planet's great diversity of people. The Science materials present certain aspects of the child's world in such a way that the child can observe, experiment, demonstrate, and record what he/she has learned. The child learns to classify, label and differentiate. The area of Science includes biology, botany, zoology, and physical science.