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Helping children become eager, confident, capable, respectful, and contributing members of the community
The Green Mountain Montessori's mission is to provide a stimulating, caring and healthy environment that guides children to reach their fullest potential – becoming responsible, independent and creative individuals who are aware and proud of whom they are…
Our Environment
The Green Mountain Montessori School is located in a wonderfully restored 1820’s brick farmhouse in the heart of Essex Town. History and beauty meet with practicality inside the school. Large sunny windows and gleaming wide-board spruce floors entice the children into the classroom – a comfortable environment where numerous learning stations await their creativity and energy.
Our Classroom
Maria Montessori believed that education should be a preparation for the "whole life". Like Montessori's first Casa, ours is structured as a mini community with a multi-aged grouping that models the real world. As the children learn to cooperate in the Casa, sometime helping a younger child, sometimes being helped by an older one, sometimes working alone in a shared space, they develop respect for each other and begin to understand what is needed for a community to thrive.
Our Montessori Curriculum
The Green Mountain Montessori School subscribes to the beliefs and guiding philosophy of Maria Montessori, an early 20th century physician and educator. Montessori believed that young children — specifically, children up to the age of six — had what she called "absorbent minds," minds able to assimilate information from the environment as if by osmosis. This being so, the classroom environment — in Montessori terms the "prepared environment" — becomes of paramount importance.
A Typical Day at Green Mountain Montessori
Children arrive at school between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m. Each child is greeted and helped to find an activity to begin working with — often a piece of work-in-progress “saved” with her/his name card at the end of the previous day — working alone or as part of a small group.
"Our aim is not only to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core."
— M. Montessori
Classroom Activities & Exercises
At the start of the year, some of the more advanced materials may not be sitting on the shelves (this depends on the readiness of the particular children to work with them). Adding materials throughout the year maintains a dynamic atmosphere and underlines to the children the progress they and their classmates have made.