A kind, gentle North Austin community school
“The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.” –Maria Montessori We’re back from Spring Break, and the students are cheerfully milling about the classroom this week. We can’t help but notice how much the students are happy to […]
See some of the love that’s been going around the last couple of weeks…
As a part of our Geography studies, we rotate themed works based on continents into all of our academic areas. In the fall, we studied Europe, and in the spring we will learn about South America. This Winter we are learning about Antarctica. However, this unit is admittedly a bit less diverse than the others. Let’s […]
We love to represent holidays in our classroom. December is perhaps the most obvious example of this, so we thought this would be a good time to explain how these works fit into our Montessori curriculum.
Our decidated art teacher, Dorte, has just finished a lovely sculpturing project with the students. In her words, here is how these works of art came to be: After opening some boxes of furniture, I was somewhat surprised to find that they didn’t use plastic or styrofoam to protect the parts, but just chunky pieces of […]
We love our playground so much! We run, and jump and play, and yesterday we had a colorful, fluttery visitor alight. The kids were entranced, and yet were so patient passing it back and forth to each other. We are so lucky–this isn’t the first time we’ve had butterflies join us at playtime. It was […]
UPDATE: On Thursday morning (9/7) we found that our first butterfly had emerged, and by the afternoon we had three more! Three more arrived by Friday morning and on Friday afternoon we released them on the playground. (Scroll down for latest pictures.) On Aug 24, we received 10 caterpillars for our classroom. They ate very fast, grew […]
First a physician and later a psychologist, social worker and pedagogue before these professions existed, or certainly before women were “allowed” to hold these jobs, Dr Maria Montessori was a brilliant mind working far before her time. Born on this day in 1870, Maria Montessori grew up the daughter of a civil servant and a well-educated mother. […]
This morning we simulated the eclipse in our classroom, then after lunch the older students viewed it with a pinhole camera and a hole-punch camera. Just a little warm-up until we have a total eclipse here in Austin in 2024!
We are so happy to be back at work after our short summer break. So great to see old friends and make new ones! As shown by the pictures below, we are beginning this year learning about the Universe.
“Sarah! There is a spider in the library!” So goes a not uncommon announcement heard around our classroom this year. Such announcement is not uttered out of fear but out of excitement and a sense of discovery. Our young students have come to admire and like spiders over the many months of school. Way back in September the announcement of finding […]
We went and did it again–we had an awesome camping trip to wrap up the month of April. As always, it’s so nice to see everyone outside of the confines of school. It was so much fun, we’re gonna do it twice next year! Here are some of the highlights…