28 months – 3.8 years
Casa Preschool
Casa means "home", and that is what the first classroom is meant to be: a place scaled to your child, where everything has a purpose and a place, and where a two-and-a-half-year-old can do real work with real materials.
From 28 months, once your child is toilet-trained and ready for school
What happens here
The first year in a Montessori classroom. Children learn to move carefully, concentrate deeply, and take part in a community larger than their family.
Practical life comes first
Pouring, sweeping, buttoning, polishing, carrying a tray without spilling. This work looks simple, but it is what builds the coordination, order and concentration that later reading and mathematics depend on.
Sensorial work sorts the world
Colour, shape, texture, sound, weight and dimension are isolated one at a time in materials the child can hold. The order this creates in a young mind is the foundation everything else is built on.
Language begins in the ear
Vocabulary building, hearing the sounds inside words, and tracing the sandpaper letters with two fingers. Children meet letters as shapes and sounds long before they are asked to read.
Mixed ages, on purpose
Younger children spend a great deal of their first year simply watching older children work. It is one of the most powerful things in the room, and it is why we do not sort children into single-age classes.
Curriculum areas
What is on the shelves
- Practical Life
- Pouring, spooning, dressing frames, food preparation, care of the classroom and of oneself.
- Sensorial
- Pink tower, brown stair, colour tablets, geometric solids, sound cylinders, fabric and texture work.
- Language
- Spoken vocabulary, sound games, sandpaper letters, first work with the movable alphabet.
- Mathematics
- Concrete understanding of quantity one through ten, number rods, spindle boxes, numerals and counters.
- Culture
- Globe and continent work, plants and animals, music, art and the beginnings of French and Spanish.
Also at Discovering Minds
The rest of the school
Junior & Senior Kindergarten
The years the earlier work pays off. Children move from sounding out words to reading fluently, and from counting to four-digit arithmetic.
Grades 1 – 4Lower Elementary
The reasoning years. Children stop asking what something is and start asking why, and the curriculum is built to meet exactly that.
28 months – Grade 4Summer Program
We do not close in July and August. The classroom stays open, the pace slackens, and a great deal more of the day happens outdoors.
Be first through the door
We are moving to one new downtown location for the 2026-27 school year. Call us or send a note now and you will be among the first families offered a tour when the doors open.