Programs
Preschool & Kindergarten

The Kindergarten Capstone Year

After completing two years of preschool, kindergartners experience their capstone year in the Children's House program.
The beauty of the Montessori classroom is the open-ended nature of the materials and curriculum. Children who are reading and computing prior to kindergarten are not held back from developing their skills.

Kindergarten is a full day program at West Side Montessori. In kindergarten, children will learn new skills and refine existing skills. Kindergartners enjoy additional opportunities to extend projects, research big ideas, attend field trips, cook, and participate in social events.

The program is designed around the developmental stages of a kindergartner: longer attention spans, inquisitiveness, the ability to understand more abstract material, and the opportunity to explore their natural interest in various topics.

Children love the Kindergarten program. They develop close friends as their social skills grow and their love of learning is sparked by the intriguing topics studied.

The program includes:

List of 7 items.

  • Kindergarten Leadership Club (KLC)

    West Side Montessori’s Kindergarten Leadership Club (KLC) was created and implemented to reinforce the social skills children develop during their Capstone Year. Each month, kindergartners have a lesson that encourages a leadership habit as well as a grace and courtesy challenge. Each session concludes with Calm Down Yoga.

  • Outdoor Education

  • World Language

    Specialized teachers engage children in communicative lessons on language and culture themes. Lessons occur once a week in Children's House for morning classes and once or twice a week for afternoon kindergarten students. Large group circle time lasts about 30 minutes and each small group meets for 15 minutes.

  • Kindergarten Kaboom STEM

    Kindergarten Kaboom is a science enrichment class. Twice a month the children don their lab coats and dive into science lessons and experiments. The children look forward to sharing discoveries at the science fair at the end of the year!

  • Field Trips

    Field trips are great ways for our kindergartners to apply what they learn in their classroom to the real world. During the school year, students typically visit places like an apple orchard, a farm, 577 Foundation, Valentine Theatre, Imagination Station, Toledo Zoo, and the Toledo Museum of Art.

  • Music

    In addition to the music groups in their classrooms each week, kindergartners participate in weekly music enrichment classes. Each class begins with a warm-up consisting of a vocal warm-up, ear training, and tongue twisters to encourage articulation. Students play games to boost performance skills, learn new music, and practice the songs to sing at the spring concert.

  • Physical Education

    Toledo Campus kindergarten children have a physical education class for 30 minutes once a week. (Perrysburg Campus kindergartners do not have a structured physical education program taught by a specialist due to space constraints.)
    Through age-appropriate games and activities such as parachute games, exploring with scooters, hula hoop adventures, and animal walks, students learn movement skills, how to follow directions and respect for themselves and others. 

    Locomotor skills such as skipping, hopping, galloping, walking backward and leaping are practiced. Hand-eye coordination is developed using scarves, balloons, bean bags and balls.

Toledo Campus

Perrysburg Campus

West Side Montessori is an independent, accredited Montessori school educating children 13 months through 8th grade (preschool, kindergarten, elementary school and middle school). We are one of the leading private schools in Toledo, and the nation.