Sai Kung Montessori

Sai Kung Montessori strictly adheres to the governing principals of the Montessori philosophy created over 100 years ago by Dr. Maria Montessori. Today, the Montessori method is practiced in over 22,000 schools world wide and we are overjoyed to be sharing it with our Sai Kung community.

Our Casa Dei' Bambini program provides a child centred approach that promotes independence and a true love of learning. Each child's unique spirit, sense of wonder and deep desire to learn is supported by a freedom to explore our prepared classroom environment under the guidance of an AMI qualified Montessori teacher. Sai Kung Montessori strives to provide a learning environment that optimally meets the needs of each child during their most crucial years of development.

Children are set up for success by acquiring the skills necessary to triumphantly pursue their curiosity of the world around them. As the students independently master new skills and concepts they grow in confidence to overcome their next challenge and a true and life-long love of learning is born.

Our Casa Dei Bambini environment also encompasses the natural world and the surrounding community. Through interactive experiences with nature and contribution to our community a sense of interconnectedness and global citizenship is fostered.

The Sai Kung Montessori student indulges a natural sense of curiosity, is empathetic to the needs of others, is a confident and creative problem solver and is a self- disciplined and self-motivated learner.

Montessori understands that children experience the world through their senses. This is why we advocate independent learning; the child must do the work of exploration themselves to truly understand the world around them.

The Sensorial Area provides precise materials that isolate for a single quality present in nature and used in everyday life. For example; length, weight, temperature, colour, diatomic scale, pressure etc. The children are free to explore these materials in their own way and to take ownership over the discoveries they make.

Each activity has an inherent control of error that allows the child to use their own reason, critical faculty and capacity for drawing distinctions. This prepares the individual to trust their own powers of reasoning and to find answers and solutions by and for themselves. Additionally, the child is given ample opportunities to apply their newly acquired knowledge to the environment. For example, use of the tasting bottles brings the child to the identification of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. The child can later explore these qualities during meal times and cooking class thus expanding and deepening their connection to the world.

Montessori believes that numeracy is just as important as literacy. The building blocks for understanding the numerical techniques of mathematics should be as foundational as the building blocks for learning how to speak, write and read.

The mathematic materials have many properties that are presented to the child in order of increasing complexity. They are accurate, hold foundational concepts, encourage exploration and possess their own control of error.

Within the Montessori environment language is viewed as the child's creation. In the same way the child taught himself to speak he will teach himself to write and to read. The child creates his own facility for language based upon what he absorbs from his environment and his level of participation and engagement within that environment.

We begin, and continue, with language enrichment activities through the use of a variety of means. Through story telling, poems, songs, rhymes and vocabulary enrichment activities the sounds of our language are isolated and quickly associated to their corresponding letters. With this knowledge the child teaches himself to build phonetic words, how to write and then how to read. Increasingly more difficult keys to the English language are presented to the child to facilitate fluency. When the child is a fluent reader the concepts of grammar and sentence structure are presented to him. Sai Kung Montessori offers a bilingual program (Putonghua and English). The Putonghua lessons and materials mirror those of the English language section described above.