Smart Start Perth

Thanks for the tweezing activity inspiration with your awesome flower tweezing activity! We love tweezing activities because they're so good for developing the pencil hold, focus and concentration!

In a Montessori environment, children practice turn-taking rather than forced sharing. When a child selects a material, they have the right to use it for as long as they wish, fostering deep concentration and respect for their own work cycle. Others learn to wait until the item is returned to the shelf, which teaches patience, community respect, and emotional regulation. This approach honors the developmental reality that children under three are still building the empathy required for sharing, while simultaneously mirroring real-world social boundaries—where one must wait for a resource to be available rather than simply taking it from another.

There’s something magical about these early years. At this age, children’s brains are like little sponges, perfectly primed to soak up new languages, sounds, and concepts. Visit our Learning at home page to download free printables or watch videos on how to teach your child to read, count or write. https://www.smartstarteducation.com.au/parent-involvement

Serve soup and say it is chocolate! ​Confidence is key, If you present something with enough conviction and flair, children will buy into the magic of it. Learning, what could be seen as the mundane things, like letters or numbers, are transformed into pure joy by a talented educator. It is a story, a comedy and an engaging experience!

Have you ever wondered why Montessori kids understand math so deeply?

Meet the Cards and Counters concept. On the surface, it is just numbers and counters. But look closer—it is a physical map of an abstract concept.

The Even vs. Odd Magic
In Montessori, we do not just tell a child a number is odd; we let them feel it.
* Even numbers are partners. The counters are placed in pairs. They have a friend. The path between them is clear.
* Odd numbers have a lonely one. There is a counter left at the bottom with no partner, blocking the path through the middle.
Why it works
* Isolation of Difficulty: The child focuses only on the sequence 1–10 and the concept of pairs.
* Self-Correction: If there is a counter left over under the number 4, the child realizes they have made a mistake in counting without an adult intervening.
* The Hand-Brain Connection: Moving from a symbol (the card) to a quantity (the counters) builds a bridge in the brain that rote memorization cannot match.
Math is not a mystery to be solved—it is a world to be felt.

Please join us tonight for a free information session about helping your young child develop their speech. We are located inside the Onslow Park Tennis complex.

Sending lots of love off with the Timor Leste Vision crew to our friends in Timor Leste.

🇹🇱 Why We Want to Support Timor-Leste Schools

1. 37% of rural youth are illiterate, with limited access to qualified teachers or basic learning materials.
2. Decades of conflict left most schools destroyed, forcing generations to grow up without safe classrooms or consistent education.
3. Timor-Leste faces chronic food poverty, and many children arrive at school hungry—if they can attend at all.
4. Timorese people are among the shortest in the world, a direct result of long-term malnutrition and poor early childhood health.
5. Every year of schooling can increase lifetime earnings by 10%, helping families break the cycle of poverty for good.