Middle Primary

6-9 years

Playgroup
18 months - 3 years

Junior Primary
3 - 6 years

Middle Primary
6 - 9 years

Upper Primary
9 -12 years

Adolescent Program
12 - 15 years

Education Support
3 - 15 years

"I want to understand my place in my peer group"

The Middle Primary Program at Beehive Montessori School is designed to encourage children ages 6 to 9 to wonder, work and explore. Students are now very sociable in nature and lessons are presented to small groups of children, rather than one-to-one as in Junior Primary.

The primary-aged child is a nascent explorer and can be characterised by their reasoning minds, their ability to abstract and imagine, and their passion for research and exploration. This is the developmental stage when creativity, learning, cooperation, imagination, and responsibility all grow and thrive.

An integrated curriculum

Subject areas are integrated throughout the curriculum in addition to being presented as separate disciplines. The Middle Primary Program aims to introduce children to the structure of understanding in key subject areas:

Language
Mathematics
Geometry
Biology
History
Geography
Music
Art

Abstract made tangible

The Montessori Primary curriculum offers a broad framework for learning, focusing on holistic understanding instead of siloing information into separate subjects. Teachers guide children to explore big philosophical questions like purpose and social roles, through the use of stories, visuals, Montessori materials and timelines to enrich their understanding.

Exploration of each area is encouraged through trips outside the classroom to local museums, libraries and theatres, enhancing the children’s understanding about the community in which they live.

Cosmic Education

The idea that everything in the universe is connected is referred to as Cosmic Education. This approach allows the students to understand that everything around them is interdependent and that they are a vital part of the universe they live in.

During the start of the year, the students are presented a series of “Great Lessons.” One by one, the stories they are told introduce the different areas of the curriculum. The stories span the history of the universe from the creation of the solar system, early life on earth to the emergence of humans, and the rise of civilisations.

Presented with materials such as timelines, impressionist charts and science experiments, these stories and concepts evoke imagination and serve to help the child in increasingly abstract understanding.

Core learning areas

English

This area begins with a sweep story about the progression and creation of the alphabet. In Middle Primary, students are still working on gaining fluency in their ability to read and to write, and stories such as this inspire engagement with this work. The Montessori language curriculum includes a rich lesson series in grammar, where students explore the various functions of words through action and story, as well as the introduction of sentence analysis.

At some point, generally in Middle Primary if not before, children experience an ‘explosion of language’ and reading and writing begin to synthesise into functional and fluent skillsets.

Mathematics: Arithmetic and Algebra

Students move into the Middle Primary classrooms with a wealth of mathematical understanding from their time in Junior Primary. Now they open their mathematical lessons with the story of numbers, a historical look at where our decimal number system began. This parallels ongoing lessons which form a continuation of the previous work from the 3-6 classrooms which look at the hierarchy of numbers, linear counting, long multiplication and long division, laws of operations, multiples, factors, divisibility, group division, fractions (both common and decimal and their related operations).

Mathematics: Geometry

Arithmetic, Geometry and Algebra are intertwined in Mathematics in a way that provides more meaning and understanding than if one takes the branches of Mathematics separately. Particular contributions from Geometry include the concepts of equality, similarity and equivalence; a study of point, line surface and solid; the study of types of polygons along with circle/angles/lines in all their details; equivalence of plane figures; area and related formulae; and volume, from equivalency to calculation of volume and formulae.

Geography

Geography

Geography is explored through the use of stories, experiments, charts and children’s activities. Geography study has two main sections: natural geography and human geography.

Natural geography includes: creation of the earth, composition of the earth, laws that elements must follow, movements of the earth and their consequences along with the work of air and water.

Human geography includes: how people have met their needs while living in different zones on the Earth, the interdependence of humans in society and economic geography.

Biology

Biology

Biology is explored through the use of stories, experiments, charts and children’s activities. The study of biology includes two main areas: botany and zoology.

Botany begins with The Story of Plants and then proceeds to look at the needs of plants, the function of leaves, roots, stems, flowers, fruits and seeds as well as their varieties and their classification.

Zoology includes story material about animals, examination of body functions and classification. Botany and Zoology are united in a study of ecology.

History

The Montessori History curriculum spans geological time, prehistory and history proper, to give students the broadest whole in which to orient themselves. Stories, timelines and charts inform these presentations.

Geology includes The story of the coming of the Universe, the creation of the Earth, and changes in the Earth over time which allowed for the existence of life on Earth.

Prehistory includes the coming of life to earth, the appearance of human beings, and the timeline of humans which ends with the agricultural revolution.

History proper begins with the story of the alphabet, and an examination of the fundamental needs of humans, as a key to explore different human groups and civilisations through time.

Parallel to this work, students also undertake a study of their own personal timelines, and examine ways in which time can be represented graphically – from telling time on a clock to a linear representations to provide context to their understanding of the passing of time.