3.8 – 6 years
Junior & Senior Kindergarten
Montessori kindergarten is not a waiting room for Grade 1. It is the culminating third year of a cycle, when everything a child has been quietly assembling since they were two suddenly comes together.
Junior Kindergarten from 3.8 years, Senior Kindergarten from 5 years
What happens here
The years the earlier work pays off. Children move from sounding out words to reading fluently, and from counting to four-digit arithmetic.
Reading arrives, and then accelerates
Children build words with the movable alphabet before they can write them, then move through phonograms, sight words and into sentence analysis. Most read fluently by the end of Senior Kindergarten.
Mathematics stays concrete
The golden bead material lets a five-year-old carry out four-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with their hands before the abstraction is ever asked for.
The senior child leads
Our oldest Casa children give lessons to the youngest, look after the classroom, and carry real responsibility. Teaching something is how they discover they truly know it.
Ontario-ready, and then some
Children finishing Senior Kindergarten here are well past the provincial kindergarten expectations, whether they continue with us into Grade 1 or move to another school.
Curriculum areas
What is on the shelves
- Language
- Phonograms, sight words, fluent reading, creative writing, grammar symbols, sentence analysis.
- Mathematics
- Decimal system, four operations with the golden beads, memorisation work, fractions, skip counting.
- Geometry
- Constructive triangles, geometric cabinet, nomenclature of lines, angles and shapes.
- Culture
- Continents and countries, land and water forms, botany, zoology, timelines, science experiments.
- Languages
- Structured French and Spanish, taught in the afternoon block by teachers who speak them.
Also at Discovering Minds
The rest of the school
Casa Preschool
The first year in a Montessori classroom. Children learn to move carefully, concentrate deeply, and take part in a community larger than their family.
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.