From (très) petite section to grande section, école maternelle forms a single, unified cycle, absolutely essential to ensuring every child’s success. Tailored to young children, lessons are structured across 24 hours a week and 36 weeks split into 5 periods. They are organised around 5 learning areas, detailed below.
1. Using language in all its forms
One of école maternelle’s priorities is to stimulate and structure spoken language, as well as develop children’s understanding of texts read aloud to them. In practice, this typically takes shape in the classroom through a dedicated “circle time” corner and ritualised activities. The link between “spoken and written language” is strengthened through nursery rhymes, short verses and finger games. Finally, école maternelle students discover the alphabetic principle…
2. Acting, expressing oneself and understanding through physical activity
In maternelle, physical activity helps each student explore their physical abilities, develop their motor skills and teamwork, become aware of their body image, and build a better sense of themselves in space and time. Naturally, this sporting practice also contributes to children’s socialisation, as well as their emotional, sensory and intellectual development.
3. Acting, expressing oneself and understanding through artistic activities
Just like sport, practising artistic activities in maternelle is an essential first step towards acquiring personal culture, built on shared reference points. In class, this takes the form of the visual arts (painting, drawing, photography, film, comics, sculpture…), sound (song, music, voice) and performing arts (dance, circus, puppetry, theatre…).
4. Building the first tools to structure one’s thinking
In maternelle, structuring one’s thinking happens through understanding numbers, measurements (length, capacity, area, mass…), shapes (triangle, square…) and ordered sequences. To develop this, children compare and estimate (roughly) volumes, lengths and collections of objects, gradually leading them to express quantities, rankings or relative positions. The aim here is to establish a solid understanding of small numbers up to 10 and give them meaning.
5. Exploring the world at école maternelle
Through the learning area “Exploring the world,” lessons at école maternelle lead children to consider time and space, two concepts that are particularly abstract for them. The aim is to help them move beyond their own point of view in order to take other people’s into account…
At the same time, they carry out experiments to distinguish the living from the non-living and become familiar with objects and matter — for example, by jointly raising a small animal (growth, reproduction, death, care…), exploring the power of a mirror (reflection of light, object and image of an object…), or building a boat (floating, permeability…)
To support your child and help them succeed, you can call on a school support professional from the Ora-Visio platform: available online, they can help your child overcome temporary and/or lasting obstacles, as is the case with DYS disorders (dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysphasia, dyspraxia…).
