The 10 Core Academic Subjects

When developing our programs, we took an exhaustive look at both Montessori and traditional curriculums. Through our research, we identified ten subject areas - Practical Life, Sensorial, Physical Science, Life Science, Humankind, The Arts, Reading and Writing, Grammar, Mathematics, Geometry.

These areas are essential and unchanging over time. Whether 6 or 160, a culturally and academically literate person has some mastery in each of these areas. We invite you to explore each of these areas in greater detail.

Click on each icon to explore that subject area.

Going Deeper

Of course, the subject areas are vast in scope — much too large to serve as essential concepts — so we further divided the content into domains, topics, and lessons (the essential concepts.)

Domains

Domains are the major concepts you’ll approach during a specific period of readiness. In the 6 - 9 year old curriculum, we identified 25 domains across the eight subject areas (2 to 4 per subject area.) Unlike the subject areas, which are persistent over time, domains change through the course of a person’s educational experience. In fact, there are many hundreds of domains that will come in and out of emphasis over time. These 25 are only the ones you’ll tackle during the first half of the second plane (ages 6 to 9.)

Here’s an example. In our Lower Elementary program, Physical Science consists of two domains: Physical Laws and Physical Geography. In later years, Physical Science will also include the domains Chemistry, Physics, and Environmental Science. Adding and removing domains over time helps us focus our work with children on specific concepts and in a specific sequence. That is, we believe 6 to 9 year old learners should focus on Physical Laws and Physical Geography.

Topics

Smaller than domains are topics. Their main value is to organize the lessons into more manageable groups. We have 222 topics for the 6 - 9 year old curriculum.

Lessons

Within the topics are the lessons - or essential concepts - themselves. We identified 1035 lessons in total.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. 

• In the subject area Physical Science,

  • We have the domain Physical Laws, which looks at things like time and Newtownian physics. 

    • One of the four topics within Physical Laws is Laws of the Universe, which pertains to things like the states of matter. 

      • Finally, of the twenty lessons in Laws of the Universe, one is Quick Evaporation, which asks us to understand that “all matter, when heated, passes from solid to liquid to gas and the hotter, the faster.” 

In other words, part of being a generally literate person in the area of Physical Science means knowing how matter acts when heated. It is an essential concept because we use the understanding in many different ways throughout our lives - to understand why there is ice at the poles and not the equator, to predict road conditions when a storm hits, to conceptualize the structure of matter and how external forces affect that structure. It’s at the lowest level of the framework because, for this age group, it’s the smallest concept to master.