Upper Elementary
Upper Elementary Program
The children who have participated in a Montessori primary may be offered admission to our Montessori elementary program. These classes offer individualized and small group instruction based on the curriculum developed by Dr. Montessori. Building on the work completed at the primary level, dynamic manipulatives are used to materialize abstract principles. The rich curriculum includes mathematics, language, reading, grammar, writing, spelling, geography, history, technology, foreign language, and science. Standardized tests are done yearly as one means of determinng the level of success achieved by our students.
(MSM does not offer childcare, but we share our facility with the Chesterbrook UMC Preschool and After Care Center, which provides after care for a portion of our student population, including elementary aged children. Their website is www.ChesterbrookPreschool.org.)
Upper Elementary News
One of the exciting additions we will be making to our Upper Elementary program this year is Montessori Model UN. Founded in 2005, MMUN offers Montessori students from the United States, Mexico, Canada and now China the opportunity to act as delegates from a designated country, write position papers, travel to New York for committee meetings with other participants and sit and vote on the floor of the United Nations on resolutions they have written and proposed.
Mr. Greg McCracken, our new Upper Elementary teacher, was among the teachers who took students to MMUN in its first year, 2006. ―In the beginning, that first year, we had only 400 students, but now the participant list has grown to more than a thousand, and students from other countries are involved. It’s really an amazing, exciting, life changing experience for the students involved.
Montessori Model UN is the only Model UN experience offered for Upper Elementary and Middle School students in the world. Designed originally as a competitive academic program for high school and college students, it was reinvented by Judith Cunningham, a longtime Montessori teacher and administrator, for Montessori students, using Dr. Montessori’s ideas on ―Peace Education as her guide.
Each day in the Upper Elementary is an adventure. We explore the natural world through our gardening, the world of numbers not only through our math work but through our weekly Math Challenges, the world of language not just by studying and categorizing language but by creating beautiful language in our sentences, paragraphs, reports, essays and stories, and the
people of the Earth through our geography studies and Model UN work.
Upper Elementary students are problem solvers – learning to extend our growing season as the weather cools through the use of the mini-greenhouse they built, tweaking and refining our pizza delivery system to the classrooms on Thursdays, building composters to help reduce the amount of refuse that we throw away each day at the school. Each day they approach their work with enthusiasm and energy, as befits the young, healthy men and women they are growing into.
Friday we are traveling into Washington, D.C. for ―Potato Chip Science,‖ a wonderful show that demon- strates many basic scientificprinciples through a medium all the students can relate to – potato chips – after which we will visit the Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins exhibit as our kickoff to a unit on, what else but, the history of human development.
The student’s have selected the Netherlands as the country they will represent at the Montessori Model UN, and they have already begun the intensive and extensive research they must do to prepare. But these are extraordinary students, who are as yet unafraid of any challenge. Their inquisitiveness, focus and effort is not just admirable but inspirational – and to see them working together, the older students teaching the younger, all conferring with each other with ease, trust and comfort, is to understand the genius of Maria Montessori’s method.
I invite all parents to visit our classroom, see the exciting work the students are doing, and to observe the peacefulness, generosity and just plain fun we are having in the learning process. I also invite all the parents of MSM to give serious consideration to allowing your own children to join the Upper El when the time comes – to offer them an experience that most students refer to later in life as ―the best, most productive, most important‖ time they spent in all their years at school.