Our teachers and staff are guided by Montessori education principals. We pride ourselves on a low student to teacher ratio. Most classes have one teacher and one teacher’s assistant with a maximum of 18 students. Our teachers develop age-appropriate activities that introduce and strengthen academic and social skills.We strive to include enrichment activities that extend our students knowledge and understanding of the world outside the classroom. Each year, our older students take a field trip to a working farm, a post office, a fire station, and other local places of interest.We are also committed to parent education. For interested parents, we offer a number of seminars throughout the year to help you better understand and support your children’s development.To ensure that this school follows the standards in the highest of traditions, all the teachers follow The Twelve Steps of the Montessori Method. Which is stated below.Twelve Points of the Montessori Method
1. It is based on years of patient observation of child nature.
2. It has proved itself of universal application. It has been tried with success with - children of almost every civilized nation. Race, color, climate, nationality, type of culture — all these make no difference to its successful application.
3. It has revealed the small child as a lover of work, intellectual work, spontaneously chosen and carried out with profound joy.
4. It is based on the child's imperious need to learn by doing. At each stage of the child's mental growth, corresponding occupations are provided by means of which the child naturally develops his or her faculties.
5. While it offers the child a maximum of spontaneity, it nevertheless enables him or her to reach the same, or even a higher, level of achievement as under "traditional" systems.
6. Though it does away with the necessity of coercion by means of rewards and punishments, it achieves a higher discipline than other approaches. It is an active discipline which originates within the child and is not imposed from without.
7. It is based on a profound respect for the child's personality and removes him or her from the preponderating influence of the adult, thus leaving the child room to grow in biological independence. Hence the child is allowed a large measure of liberty — not license — which forms the basis of true discipline.
8. It enables the teacher to deal with each child individually in each subject area, and thus guide each child according to individual requirements.
9. Each child works at his or her own pace. Hence, the quick child is not held back by the slower, nor is the latter, in trying to "keep up" with the former, obliged to flounder along hopelessly out of depth. Each stone is "well and truly laid" before the next is added.
10. It does away with the competitive attitude and its train of baneful results. More than this, at every turn it presents endless opportunities among the children for mutual help, which is joyfully given and gratefully received.
11. Since the child works from his or her own free choice, without competition and coercion, the child is freed from danger of over-strain, feelings of inferiority, and other experiences which apt to be the unconscious cause of profound mental disturbances in later life.
12. Finally, the Montessori Method develops the whole personality of the child, not merely his intellectual faculties but also his powers of deliberation, initiative and independent choice, with their emotional complements. By living as a free member of a real social community, the child is trained in those fundamental social skills which form the basis of good citizenship.
Montessori Philosophy
North Little Rock Montessori School
Educating since 1969
