Montessori International Children's House, Annapolis

Our mission is to provide a Montessori education, guided by AMI principles, that fosters the intellectual curiosity and creativity of our students. At MICH, children, staff and families collaborate to build and maintain a respectful, diverse and nurturing school community. The Toddler Community is an intimate community of twelve children with a trained directress and two assistants. The environment provides a specific structure to meet the physical, psychological and cognitive needs of toddlers. The Toddler Program emphasizes language enrichment, sensory-motorexploration and "practical life" activities to foster the toddler's growing sense of independence. Cooperation and collaboration are emphasized in all adult-toddler interactions. Before the age of six, children possess unusual sensitivity and mental powers for absorbing and learning from the environment. Dr. Montessori called this mental power the "absorbent mind." At this level, there is a great need and potential for careful, exacting work and a natural desire to learn. The Montessori primary classroom allows children to explore, develop their senses, and learn for themselves during this stage of heightened receptivity. There are thirty children with a trained directress and an assistant. The children stay with the same directress for three or four years. The classroom is a "living room" in which self-correcting educational materials are displayed on open shelves organized by logical, orderly, distinct areas called practical life, sensorial, language, mathematics, and cultural subjects. The Montessori curriculum provides uninterrupted blocks of time during which each child is engaged in captivating learning activities which foster self-discipline and concentration.