Athletics

Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world. – Maria Montessori

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Athletic Focal Points

1. Movement:  Random movements become coordinated and controlled: grasping, touching, turning, balancing, crawling, and walking. 

2. Language:   A progression from babble to words to phrases to sentences, with a continuously expanding vocabulary and comprehension. 

3. Small objects:  A fixation on small objects and tiny details.

4. Order:  Characterized to be a desire for consistency and repetition and a passionate love for established routines.  Children can become deeply disturbed by disorder.

5. Music:  Spontaneous interest in and the development of pitch, rhythm, and melody. 

6. Grace and Courtesy:  Imitation of polite and considerate behavior leading to an internalization of these qualities into the personality.

7. Reinfinement of the Senses:  Fascination with sensorial experiences (touch, taste, sound, weight, smell) resulting in children learning to observe and in making increasingly refined sensorial discrimination. 

8. Writing:  Fascination with the attempt to reproduce letters and numbers with pencil or pen and paper.  Montessori discovered that writing precedes reading. 

9. Reading:  Spontaneous interest in the symbolic representations of the sounds of each letter and in the formation of words. 

10. Spatial Relationships:  Forming cognitive impressions about relationships in space, including the layout of familiar places.  Children become more able to find their way around their neighborhoods, and they are increasingly able to work complex puzzles. 

11. Mathematics:  Formation of the concepts of quantity and operations from the uses of concrete material aids.