CENTER ACTIVITIES | Instructional Method

At SOCDS our students are engaged with Center Work for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. The teachers set up different centers throughout the classroom and use a variety of techniques to start children to the centers and to ensure that children rotate through all the centers.

The beauty of the Montessori Tradition is that most of the center experiences are scalable. This means that similar materials can be used for a variety of skill levels. Maria Montessori referenced this method as letting children become familiar with their world, and then disrupting their current understanding. Children will feel safe exploring similar materials to better understand the next set of learning objectives.

This chart demonstrates the scalability of our centers:

Center Experience	Initial Learning Objective	Next Activity	Next Learning Objective
Scooping flour into a sifter and then using the sifter to sift the floor	Fine Motor Skill
		Have children roll a die to determine the number of flour scoops to be added	Number recognition and 1:1 correspondance
		Hiding items in the flour and having the children match those items to a control card	Eye Hand Coordination Visual discrimination

Sorting colored marbles into matching baskets using pointer and thumb	Pincer grip development Sorting Ability Color identification and recognition
		Using Chinese soup spoon as scoop	Fine motor skill development
		Adding stickers to the marbles for additional classification	Sorting Classification
		Adding a numberal to the baskets and asking children to place the number of matching marbles in each basket	Sorting Numeral identification 1:1 correspondance

	Letter recognition Practicing Spelling of Name
		Using control cards to spell three letter words	Letter recognition Phonetic spelling
		Ordering the letters in alphabetic order	Sorting Ordering
		Identifying beginning sounds from pictures and matching to the letter	Fine motor skill Sound Identification Phonetic Awareness

South Orange Country Day School l 461 Vose Avenue l South Orange NJ 07052
Phone: 973.762.6451