language at guidepost montessori.
Our approach to early, joyful literacy
Young children are especially primed and motivated to build language skills—it’s why they’re able to pick up the language spoken at home almost by magic, simply by being exposed to it.
Instead of waiting until 1st grade when children have moved on from this stage, and when building literacy requires more difficult effort, Guidepost Montessori capitalizes early on the young child’s ability and interest with language. With carefully designed materials and a gentle approach, the more abstract skills necessary for reading and writing are brought to the concrete level of toddlers and preschoolers.
features of guidepost montessori's language curriculum:
Intuitive, hands-on phonics
Children learn to read not with worksheets, but with ‘sound games’ to build phonemic awareness, and then hands-on materials to learn the associated written symbols.
Strengthening the hand
Before writing with a pencil, children do activities to build their hand strength and dexterity, and practice ‘writing without writing’ by using wooden letters to compose words and sentences—even whole stories!
Meaningful grammar
With specialized materials that bring grammar to the child’s level, children learn the fundamentals, such as the parts of speech, in a way that feels like an exciting revelation.
Nido
In Nido, infants build the foundation of literacy and fine motor control with:
- Daily read-aloud stories, poems, and songs
- Art activities using chalk, clay, paint, and crayons
- Natural language conversations and ongoing descriptions of the class activities and interactions
Toddler
In our toddler program, children expand their work with language using:
- Miniature ‘language objects’ and activities to learn the names of everyday items, animals, instruments and so much more
- Read-alouds of high-quality children’s literature
- Puzzles that require using the same pincer grip used in writing
Children’s House
In Children’s House, children blossom in their literacy ability, using:
- Sandpaper letters to learn the alphabet and then digraphs like ‘ee’ ‘ph’ and ‘th’
- The movable alphabet to compose words and sentences
- Decodable readers to make the transition from sounding out words to fluent reading—often progressing to reading chapter books independently in kindergarten
at guidepost montessori, we believe every child is tremendously capable.
But what’s even better, the children believe it too.
Every child at Guidepost Montessori knows they can accomplish real things and engage in real learning. Not because someone tells them so, but because they choose it, experience it, and succeed at it every single day.