At Casa de Niños, we strive to ensure that our students enjoy the beauty and love of our Montessori-prepared environment. Everything in the classroom, down to the finest detail, is prepared well in advance to enhance a specific aspect of the child’s development. Children appreciate beauty and organization. The desire for beauty in the environment is not a luxury. It is a need for the child, a way for them to connect to the environment. Dr. Maria Montessori’s works were created with the intention of doing just that; to create materials so that they are beautiful and enticing to the child. She believed that objects should be fragile and beautiful. At Casa de Niños, we make the world accessible to the child by having a prepared environment and allowing freedom for the child’s human tendencies to become operative within the environment.
OUR MISSION
To encourage the development of the whole child by providing a Montessori education. We prepare children to thrive. We educate them with peace and prepare them for life. Casa de Niños exists to serve children; we continually ask how we may better serve each child. We provide a dynamic environment to encourage personal growth, academic accomplishments, and intellectual curiosity. We establish within a child the intellectual, emotional, and physical rigor needed to become a self-directed learner, flexible thinker, and creative problem solver and support their ever-increasing curiosity about the world in which they live.
OUR VISION
At Casa De Niños Bilingual Montessori School, we are driven by a profound vision that recognizes the significance of work in shaping one’s life. We believe that true satisfaction comes from engaging in great work, and the key to achieving this is to love what you do. As an AMI Montessori-trained guide, a mother of four children, and the proud founder of our school, I am committed to creating a nurturing environment that addresses every aspect of a child’s development.
Our goal is to offer a prepared environment that caters to the holistic growth of each child. We understand that the love for work is a precious gift that empowers children to reach their fullest potential. By fostering an environment tailored to meet their individual learning needs, we provide them with the opportunity to thrive. We deeply value every human being’s basic needs—physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.
Recognizing that a child’s desire to work is a fundamental instinct, we believe that working is how they build and organize their personalities. It is through work that a person constructs their identity. To describe the precision of the human mind, Maria Montessori aptly coined the term “Mathematical Mind.” This term underscores the intricate and exact nature of the human mind, emphasizing the importance of education in nurturing this inherent quality.
A DAY AT CASA DE NIÑOS
When you enter a room at Casa de Niños, it is pleasant with natural lighting, lovely photographs, and framed paintings hanging in view for the children. Magnificent and scientifically informed Montessori materials fill the room.
Each exquisite work is carefully fashioned from superior natural materials and resembles a piece of artwork. Different plants and flowers decorate the room. The room is busy with children working with assorted materials, sitting at child-sized tables and chairs, or on the floor with small rugs. A few children purposefully walk around the room, considering different works or activities arranged on the child-sized shelves. Each child, whether working independently or quietly in pairs, is happily absorbed in the task before them.
It is a unique and fascinating place where multi-aged children actively engage in a myriad of purposeful activities. Each child chooses his/her own “work,” whether it be polishing, painting, preparing a snack, watering a plant, matching, grading the knobbed cylinders or pink tower cubes, touching and sounding out the sandpaper letters, labeling a map of the world, or learning about quantities with the spindle rods. They are able to enjoy considerable freedom of choice and activity because of the carefully “prepared environment” tailored to their sizes, abilities, and needs and because of learning how to live within a community of respect, LOVE, and order.
The Montessori guide follows the individual child’s development by linking the child to an activity or material depending on his/her need, interest, or readiness. Thus, the children progress at their own pace and build a foundation of skills needed for life. In our mixed-aged communities, social interaction spontaneously occurs, benefiting all the children. The younger children are inspired by the advanced work they see, and the older children reinforce their skills and enhance their self-confidence and self-esteem by teaching the younger ones. All the children learn to become an important and contributing member of their community. A Spanish immersion environment helps the child learn multiple languages naturally and simultaneously.
BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT
Immersive Bilingual Learning Experience
Children can learn any language with minimal effort in a natural way during the sensitive period of language (birth to age 8). The “absorbent mind” of the child picks up the language by making associations with what is heard in the daily routines and the materials the child is seeing and using. In addition to developing a usable fluency in Spanish, the children develop the ability and willingness to tolerate ambiguity and to search for meaning. Exposure to a second language not only stimulates and challenges the brain but builds an extra mental capacity and further develops concentration, listening, analyzing, and verbal skills. Our staff is mostly bilingual (Spanish-English). Spanish is an integral part of our curriculum. Children hear Spanish throughout the day. Teachers introduce Spanish through songs, games, instructions, greetings, and special lessons.
WHAT IS AMI
AMI was formed in 1929 by Dr. Maria Montessori to ensure that her philosophy and approach to education would be carried on as she intended. Dr. Montessori’s goal was to foster the full development of the human being. A school or teacher that carries the AMI certificate is continuing the tradition of quality first established by Dr. Montessori, a tradition that incorporates standards based directly on Dr. Montessori’s work.
WHY CHOOSE CASA DE NIÑOS
Students emerge with a deep academic understanding, independence, resilience, and a confident love of learning.
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” – Aristotle