Academic excellence
Ms Foy
In a Montessori environment children are working in a specially prepared environment. They are surrounded with materials that are chosen to teach skills needed by a child to prepare for life in the community. The freedom of choice allowed encourages the child to make self- motivated choices. Lessons learned this way have a greater impact on the child, and the result is academic excellence. This is what we have noticed in our long history of working with children. If the child is allowed, and encouraged to learn, and is placed in an enriched environment, he will learn for the sake of learning, and experiences the joy and satisfaction as a result. He is not working on a reward and punishment schedule. He is working for his own personal satisfaction. The teacher works to inflame the child’s imagination, nurtures, and provides rich learning materials, that have no limits. There are no bars set for the child, for example if a fourth grade child is interested in what a fifth grade child is learning he is allowed to observe and choose to do so. The only requirement is the child’s interest and ability. A surprising discovery we have made is that that if a child is given a set amount of learning to complete in a set amount of time it actually lowers expectation! Once done there is no internal joy, because the child has worked to the teacher’s time table not his own, and will simply wait for further direction. This is really a tragic situation, because a child’s curiosity has no limits. In our elementary classes the teachers discourage “due dates”, as learning does not stop at a due date. Once a lesson is presented the child is encouraged to go further with the given concept and discover more than has been presented. Younger children are not forbidden to look at and attempt work that an older child is doing. A pleasant surprise of this type of learning is that our children think nothing of continuing to work long after the presented work is done. A happy by product is that Montessori children excel in every area of learning when they transition to the public school system. The primary focus in this type of education is not only on good test grades, but the good grades are achieved anyway! In our twenty years experience our children have no challenge doing the public school tests, and we do have these tests given to expose the children to what they will experience after they leave us.
We track our children after they transition to public school and the results are very gratifying. All our graduates have had an excellent track record and gone on to pursue further university education in various prestigious universities around the nation.
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