our values
C’E Montessori is a community school. The school as a whole is built to be representative and participative. Dr. Montessori developed the concept of ‘Peace Education’ to instill children with purpose, a sense of justice, and in order to create communities of positive change. The concept of Peace Education remains at our core. “Preventing conflict is the work of politics,” Dr. Montessori wrote, “establishing peace is the work of education.”
OUR PEACE CURRICULUM
Peace Education is about problem solving, open-mindedness and restorative justice conflict resolution. Our community believes in gender inclusivity and acceptance and in the strength behind diversity. We believe that learning from and understanding people from all places around the world brings us closer together. Our strong physical and cultural geography curriculum begins in the Infant room.
OUR EARTH
Our children first work tirelessly on caring for themselves, gaining more independence each day. Then, they start taking care of other communities they belong to. They care for their classroom, they care for their friends, and they begin to care for the plants and animals of our world.
Ecology is a cornerstone of our Peace Education curriculum. Children learn about moderation, preservation, recycling, while building a lifelong relationship with our Earth and understanding their responsibility in taking care of it.
GREEN CURRICULUM
We build an exciting relationship to our natural world by exploring and enjoying nature. Weekly excursions to the community gardens in our neighborhood, collections and catalogs of leaves, rocks, and flowers at our parks, a thriving garden and greenhouse of our own all contribute to growing involved with nature.
Later, we model how to take care of our classroom plants through lessons in Practical Life, adopt trees on our street, and grow a garden of our own using recycled organic food waste and worm composting.
In our Primary and Lower Elementary classrooms we discuss our responsibility as part of the planet and actively commit to sustainability, exploring together the dangerous causes and effects of global warming.
growing a brooklyn garden
Our very own garden, including a working greenhouse and a full time gardener is instrumental to our organic snack program. Children enjoy growing flowers, spices and vegetables and are introduced to what they will be eating. A garden helps children learn about the environment and keeps them outside and physically active. Gardening is an important social tool to bond with classmates, teachers and parents creating exciting shared achievements.
teaching anti-racism
C'E Montessori stands in solidarity with the Black community and joins all those in the fight against racism. Our school understands the critical importance and responsibility of Education, and specifically Early Childhood Education in creating a more equitable society. We strive to be a community where children, teachers and families from varied backgrounds learn and work together in harmony, and where we confront the realities of racism and fight together towards a greater peace.
In our classrooms, experiences and lessons are immersive. Practical Life is sprinkled throughout and carries themes that are nearly invisible yet present everywhere. Reading books and discussing important Black figures, injustice and privilege are all part of our anti-racist curriculum, but consider how culture is learned and experienced - through being ubiquitous. Our music, our art-making, our practical life work, our imagery, our taste buds, everything in concert creates an experience where children get accustomed to and ultimately expect Black representation and excellence.
gender-inclusive curriculum
Gender is an element of identity that children are eager to explore and understand. Our classrooms are gender-inclusive, bias- and binary-challenging communities. We actively confront traditional gender roles and harmful stereotypes that so powerfully affect our children. We are an open community that invites all conversation, planned and spontaneous with children, parents and staff. We accept any and all gender expression and encourage exploring identity.
A gender inclusive curriculum at our school focuses on staff best-practice training, institutional diversity policies, instructional guidelines and vetting of classroom materials, and the examination of interpersonal relationships. All should feel welcome and comfortable in our community. We examine, teach and model the concept and practice of consent beginning with our youngest children.
organic snacks
Developing a great early relationship with real food and its impact on our health is an important part of our curriculum. We have monthly tastings, meet about menus, have weeklong snack helpers that prepare food for our whole school, grow our own food in the garden and explore culture through food.
Our children eat together at tables, from plates using silverware, they wash their own dishes and clean up after themselves, leaving the space ready for the next friend like they learn to do in the classroom with any other material. Food time is a perfect time to learn social skills and is a time children should and do enjoy at school.
C'E Montessori prides itself on serving organic food for both the morning and afternoon snack. Our Primary classroom children prepare the food along with their teachers each morning, following a menu full of organic and whole foods that provide the vitamins and nutrients they need to grow. Our Elementary children begin to choose, source and obtain their own food and begin to cook complex menus. We post a monthly snack schedule and are very vigilant about children’s allergies and respecting parents’ choices as to what is served to their children.
We provide organic ingredients for classroom cooking projects throughout the year which we try to do as often as possible to instill a love of cooking and healthy food. Preschoolers do better with organic whole foods and plenty of fruits and vegetables.
parents at school
Parents and families work together with our teachers and staff to move our community forward. They participate by joining or leading committees, attending social gatherings, and contributing as guests or speakers in educational events at school. Our parent community is active both socially and in support of their children's work in the classroom. Families becoming close friends is a key priority we consider each year as we create a school calendar of events.
Parents are regularly invited and welcome into our classrooms. They lead circle at their children's celebration of life each year, they read to the class, they share cultural presentations and impressionistic lessons. We have an international community with parents coming from every continent on our globe and sharing those stories with our children to make evident how interconnected our world has become. Parents come in to learn and to teach, supporting the idea that this is a community of learning and showing their children that they value the work that they accomplish each day.
“We had lived in New York City and then Brooklyn for ten years before we sent Jillian to c’e Montessori and as we moved back to Rhode Island years later we realized that this was the strongest community we had ever felt a part of, we felt a true sense of belonging.”
- Emily