The
Montessori curriculum for children between infancy and two years of age has been an active topic of discussion. The main focus of the curriculum is to help your young child develop in the areas in which he or she should naturally be focusing such as language, body and brain coordination and development, and interaction with others.
Some of the simplest material that we introduce for infants and toddlers is the most important. For example, there is a whole section of lessons in the album that addresses brain and body development directly: the object permanence box use that covers the stage of development in which children discover that an object continues to be the same, even when you cannot see it (e.g. Mommy still exists even if she has gone to work this morning); imbucare boxes designed for infants to work on hand-eye coordination as he or she works with cylinders, cubes, triangle prisms, and rectangular prisms (are you using the language of the pieces to introduce the vocabulary to your child?); supinated wrist movement exercises that help children work with hand and wrist movements that will be the foundation for writing, fine motor skills, and other key movements later, and; simple shape puzzles, bells, and mirrors.
We discourage you from attempting to push reading and other topics that might be considered more academic at this time. The building blocks for development are crucial, and your child is not helped by learning to memorize words on cards or other material that is outside of his or her developmental needs now.
The prices of material such as the imbucare boxes or the object permanence boxes can be a bit daunting, but you can usually find good deals online and the price of these pieces of material are inline with those of regular toys, so we encourage you to make the substitution when you buy gifts and toys for your child. A lot of our readers have had success putting this material on gift lists for holidays and other special occasions as well.
