This wonderful place.

I love Montessori. Not merely the materials and the way they call each child at different stages of development. I love Montessori as a way of living. I love the endless opportunities a Montessori environment offers each child who enters it. I love how the small community that is created accepts every new child as if he was a long-lost family member reunited. I love that the “oldest” children in the environment not only teach the youngest; they mentor, nurture, adore, and protect them. So, why tack on a Before or After school Program at the beginning and end of a child’s school day? Is it truly to suit the child, or is it simply easier for the adults to sustain? Throughout the years, I have become a bit of a crusader of All Day Montessori. I am an advocate of eliminating before and after school care in Montessori schools in order to encourage all of these wonderful things to continue to grow into something that resembles a living community: All Day and, ideally, All Year.

Every day for the last thirty-three years, I have been fortunate to call two special places “home.” I can confidently say that the children with whom I share my professional space today also see it as a home away from home. How can I be so sure? Well, if you were to ask me the same question within the first five years of this very unstable All Day, All Year program, I would have likely cried and then said that I wasn’t sure of anything on any given day. If it weren’t for those first terribly unsettling years, I would not be able to confidently say that children who stay at school for longer hours than a traditional school day are best served in a Montessori classroom ALL DAY LONG. Their classroom. Their space. Isn’t that what we might call authentic Montessori? 

Margaret Elizabeth Stephenson, Reminiscences and Thoughts About Montessori Day Care...

“I sometimes wonder today if we need to extend the time the children are in school much more than we do. Perhaps the daycare situation will give us the possibility of doing that. Since many Montessori schools have the children only from 9:00 to 2:30 or 3:00, I wonder if we have seen the child’s real capacity for work – that capacity to form oneself if given the right environment and the right conditions. Perhaps this true capacity for the work of self-development is something that we will see coming out of the necessity for keeping children in day care situation.”

- Describing a combination daycare/Montessori school in London during World War II.