If you were lucky enough to be at Greensboro Montessori School last Thursday night, or with us via the livestream, you were treated to quite a show! Simply put: our fourth, fifth, and sixth graders' 17th annual Fare Faire production, “Back to Families Feudal,” was fantastic: high-quality, well-researched, technically sound, aesthetically powerful, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Fare Faire is a rite of passage for Upper Elementary students at Greensboro Montessori School. This annual theatrical production integrates students’ language arts, history, and performing arts curriculum. As students learn about the medieval historical period, they also read related literature and work together to bring a story to life on stage. The name, “Fare Faire,” is a creative play on words which highlights the communal meal Upper Elementary students and their families enjoy before the student-led performance - this year the potluck dinner of years' past gave way for a sweeter dessert feast.

And with all this work, all this project-based learning, all this technical and logistical demand of putting on a 31-person theatrical production, I have to ask: where were the teachers? I barely saw them all night.

I heard Cathy Moses and Tessa Kirkpatrick may have been backstage to reassure a few worried students or help with a tricky transition; and I saw Jonathan McLean and John Archambault lingering over at the light and sound board, and even once saw them each use the spotlight, but I think it was only because the sixth grader running the sound board told them what to do. The rest of the time, I saw the teachers pretty much relaxing and enjoying the show, sometimes just leaning against the bleachers or even sitting in the audience. When I complimented them on the show, they said, “Yes, the students did a great job.” While I cannot underscore the intense, long, and passionate hard work the faculty have put in over the past three weeks, one thing was crystal clear Thursday night: the teachers were not in charge of this show. The students were.

In my 20 years of independent school education, I’ve seen plenty of wonderful “student-led” productions. But not until our very own Fare Faire, have I seen a show so incredibly run by the students. When we walked into the Gym, it was a student decorations manager who had transformed the space into a medieval stage; where there was a line forgotten, it was a student director who whispered a line; when there was a costume glitch, it was the student costume manager who responded; whenever someone missed a cue to come on stage, there was a student stage manager giving them a gentle shove onto the stage; or when one of the mics crackled, it was the student sound manager who adjusted the board settings.

Sixth graders have the opportunity to step into leadership roles for the production. Stella and Mahinda were the directors. Leila the stage and decorations manager. Whitley was in charge of costumes, while she and Stella also worked with Jillian Crone to spearhead marketing for the show. Andrew was in charge of sound and lights, while Mohamed was in charge of microphones. Dalia was in charge of props, and Kylee in charge of photography. Leading their fourth and fifth grade peers in producing Fare Faire is a capstone experience for these students. They had been preparing for that responsibility and honor all throughout the first two years of their three-year cycle.

Our three-year Upper Elementary program has always delivered a strong and unique learning experience for our students. Building on the Montessori skills and foundations that have been developed throughout the Primary and Lower Elementary divisions, our fourth through sixth graders are empowered to come into their own as they transition to the Upper School. They take responsibility for their learning in real-life applications; they develop all the academic and social-emotional skills they need to thrive in life; and they learn who they are and how they will step into the world. It is a critical time in the students’ development. And it is big work.

And that big work is guided by a group of inspired and hard-working “teacher-guide-people,” as the faculty sometimes call themselves. Each subject matter experts themselves, they know that so much of the Montessori approach is correctly and carefully setting up the prepared learning environment to guide the students to their own success. With most traditional schools, and even some great schools that try to be more innovative, the model is teachers as the "sage on the stage," filling students with facts and information; not at our school. It is teachers as guides, teachers as inspirers, teachers as coaches, and teachers as expert listeners, researchers, and observers to see what each and every student uniquely needs.

So, where are the teachers?

They are there, every single step of the way, knowing how to both nurture and challenge, knowing how to inspire and empower students to do the work themselves, and knowing when to step back and let the students take ownership and responsibility for their own work, for their own success, and for their own theatrical production, as was the case during the simply fantastic Fare Faire production on a recent and chilly Thursday night in January.

Dear Friends,

A very Happy 2019 to you all! I wanted to send a personal note of thanks to each and every one of you for your contributions to our School. Whether you donate your time, your talent, or your treasure, every gesture is appreciated and celebrated.

As our children are busy doing their important work in their classes, the GMSCA is also doing our important work cultivating and supporting a vibrant and engaged parent community. Looking ahead, we will have many opportunities to get together to support our children, our faculty, and each other. Keep a look out for these upcoming events - we hope you'll find there's something for everyone!

See you in our community, whether we're enjoying a student performance at school or breaking bread together at a local restaurant!

Karen Kelly,
GMSCA Lead Coordinator

To have Greensboro Montessori School's academic calendar (and other school events) automatically sync with your personal calendar, subscribe to our school calendar. To ensure you the most relevant events to your family get pushed to your calendar, we encourage you to customize your subscription based your child's division.

  1. Visit our online calendar.
  2. Find the "Categories" filter sitting on the left side, just above the calendar.
  3. Use the drop-down menu to select your child's division.
    1. For Toddler, please find and select your child's specific classroom.
    2. If your have children enrolled in more than one division, please select all applicable divisions.
    3. Select "GMS Athletics" to also subscribe to the Panthers' game schedule.
  4. Scroll down to the bottom right corner and click "Subscribe to filtered calendar."
  5. Select your desired calendar app, and follow the remaining prompts to complete your subscription to the GMS calendar.

On Friday, October 26, 2018, Greensboro Montessori's head of school, Dr. Kevin Navarro, received a formal notice of retirement from the School's bus. Seeing as the bus is a valued member of the team with over 19 years of service to the School, we felt it appropriate to share its retirement letter with the entire community. The letter is reprinted below (with the bus' permission, of course).

Dear Dr. Navarro,

I love everything about Greensboro Montessori School. The way every child is empowered to have a real voice and real agency. The way students learn how to apply their academic skills in intentional and authentic ways. And the way students learn to work and wrestle with, understand, and clearly articulate complex ideas.

However, I think we both know, it’s time for a change. I humbly request you accept this letter as my formal notice of retirement effective December 31, 2018.

Words will never fully express the gratitude I feel for the purpose-filled career Greensboro Montessori School has given me. During my 19 years at the School, I've been on many adventures throughout the state, including the Wright Brothers National Memorial, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, and Roanoke Island Festival Park. Many years ago I took the faculty to Florida for an American Montessori Society (AMS) Conference. I know the way to the School’s Land campus in Oak Ridge by heart, and I've been to hundreds of Panther sporting events.

What I treasure most is the miles I've logged with over 500 different students. I know them each by name. I've laughed at their jokes, been in on their secrets, and love their playlists! My greatest honor has been watching them grow from toddlers (when they didn't even know I existed) to teens (when they sometimes treated me as if I didn't exist). No matter what, it has been a journey of love.

I hope you know I am proud of what I've achieved. I wish I could work forever, but truth be told, I'm getting a bit tired:

It’s time. We both know it is, and I’m sure you will find a great replacement to honor the incredible work you do with our students. I look forward to fulfilling my duties through the end of the year and will gladly help you and the team find my replacement. Depending on the expediency of your search, I may also be available for some consulting in the spring. In the meantime, if there's anything else you need, please let me know. When not working, I'm usually resting in the grassy lot on campus.

All my best and all my love,

The GMS School Bus

To my fellow GMS Families,

Welcome to the 2018-19 school year!

The Greensboro Montessori School Community Association (GMSCA) is excited and honored to welcome families joining our school community for the first time.  We’re also proud to welcome back our returning families for another wonderful year at GMS!

Our hope is that every family will find value in the GMSCA.  Our mission is focused on building and sustaining community. More specifically, "the GMSCA is a dynamic, inclusive organization that strives to enrich the school experience for all. We foster a vibrant school community, and serve to bridge and connect home and school while supporting the mission and goals of Greensboro Montessori School."

Unlike many public and private schools, membership in the GMSCA is automatic and free! We don't ask for or require dues. Nor do we ask you or your children to sell anything. Instead, our activities are funded through other ways, with our primary source of income being the School's fall and spring Scholastic Book Fairs. We also raise funds through initiatives like Harris Teeter's Together in Education (link your VIC card to #1849), General Mills' Box Tops for Education, and AmazonSmile.

The most visible way you will see the GMSCA in action is through GMSCA-sponsored events, teacher appreciation initiatives, and community volunteering.

We invite you to connect with us. Whether you join our private Facebook group, volunteer at the Fall Festival (details coming later this month), or contribute in your own way, we appreciate every gesture of kindness and community-building. Most importantly, know you don’t need to attend a meeting, host an event, or take a day off work to volunteer to be an essential member of our school community.

We’re looking forward to an amazing 2018-19 for our School, our families and, most of all, our children.

See you at school!

Cordially,

Karen Kelly

GMSCA Lead Coordinator

2017-18 has been a fantastic year at Greensboro Montessori School, and we very much appreciate the students, families, and teammates who have been part of our community. Looking back on our year together, we have accomplished much, grown together, and discovered new things, ideas, and places. This year, our community came together in new and vibrant ways to build a new foundation that will launch our School into the future.

Looking back on any given school year, there are many ways to articulate or quantify success. For me, knowing that every single one of our students, and every single one of our teammates, joyfully worked hard is satisfaction enough. But that is just the beginning of the story. Our team recently reflected on why we each think this year was such a success. Here are a few of our answers:

Yes, we had a fantastic year.

With the last day of the 2017-18 year upon us, our final week is an opportunity to joyfully celebrate our graduates, sadly say goodbye to departing friends, and congratulate each other on all we've accomplished and learned. We should also humbly remember how fortunate we each are to be part of such a loving, empowering, and grounded learning community like Greensboro Montessori School.

Whether you’re a student, parent, teammate, alumni, or friend of the School, we’re glad you are part of our crew.

Calling all green thumbs! Greensboro Montessori School is seeking summer volunteers to help us tend our lush, 10-acre campus!

More specifically, our campus is home to four organic, permaculture gardens, which have been flourishing since 1997. These gardens serve as outdoor classrooms where our students engage in environmental education unique to Greensboro Montessori School. Students participate in year-round experiential lessons in which they tend to every aspect of garden work ... from seed to table. We have over 20 fruit-bearing trees, a pond, honey bees, chickens, a commercial-grade teaching kitchen, and much more. This year we’re looking for five families in total, one from each of the major divisions at our School - Junior High, Upper Elementary, Lower Elementary, Primary,  and Toddler - to help keep the gardens growing and looking gorgeous all year long!

When do we need you? We would love volunteer support from Monday, June 25 through Monday, August 6, and we will adapt  our need to families' summer vacations. Ideally, we would love for volunteers to schedule work time anytime on Monday and Wednesday mornings between 8:30 a.m. and noon. Eliza Hudson, lead environmental educator, will be on campus at those times in case any assistance is needed. However, if you can only volunteer on another day, for instance, on the weekends, we would love to work with you!

What will you do? Weeding, watering, mulching paths, and harvesting, when available. All we ask is you check in with Eliza for 15 minutes at the beginning of each week to prioritize your work. Other than this "administrative" task, our summer garden volunteer role is designed to be a no-stress opportunity ... we encourage you to bring your children, have fun, relax, and enjoy the gardens in the peak season!

Interested in helping? Please email Eliza Hudson and plan on attending Volunteer Orientation on Wednesday, June 13 at 1 p.m. If you are unable to make this Orientation, we can offer a personal orientation at a time more convenient for you.

Sara Stratton leads Primary students in making dressing for their strawberry spinach salads.

Springtime is always joyful in Greensboro Montessori School's organic gardens. Winter buds swell and burst, capturing the eyes and hearts of community members, no matter their age! Flowers of all kinds call to us and to our pollinator friends, and sooner than we realize, we reach the height of the season.

This year brought a colder and wetter forecast than in the past. We’ve still yet to harvest our first sugar snap peas, but the strawberries and spinach are out with a vengeance! We continue to enjoy the lushness all the early rain and cool weather brought, even as temperatures rise. Here’s a brief update from our spring adventures!

Primary and Lower Elementary have enjoyed plenty of weeding, watering, planting, and tasting. We just finished a week full of strawberry spinach salads, with a bit of fennel and spring onions thrown in for fun! (Check out the recipe below if you’re interested in trying this at home.) In Upper Elementary, we celebrated the conclusion of our Student Climate Change Summit art exhibition with a persimmon-ginger-honey ice-cream party! Everyone agreed it was fun to make and even better to taste!

Thanks to everyone who attended our Spring Community Garden Workday in the Primary Garden. Together, with roughly 20 volunteers from our school community (ranging in age from 18 months to 70 years old!), we had a blast and accomplished a swath of projects:

What else have we been up to in the organic gardens this spring? We have been incredibly blessed with the generosity of The Fund for GMS. You may have noticed several new Adirondack chairs, benches, swinging benches, outdoor sinks, and chalkboards in all three of our organic gardens. We also have a new Lower Elementary toolshed coming soon. The students have relished in these new additions to their outdoor classrooms, and we couldn’t be more grateful to have such gifts shared with us from within our school community. Thank you, for your continued support of environmental education at Greensboro Montessori School. From all of us on your environmental education teaching team, Happy Spring!

Strawberry Spinach Salad

For the salad:

For the dressing:

Eliza HudsonAbout the Author

Eliza Hudson is Greensboro Montessori School's lead environmental educator. Eliza holds her bachelor's degree in biology from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. She has built and tended school gardens, taught hands-on cooking lessons and connected local farms to school programs working for FoodCorps. Prior to joining Greensboro Montessori School in 2014, Eliza was a classroom and after-school assistant at the Richmond Friends School, a farm intern at a family-owned farm in Ohio, and served as assistant director at a summer day camp in an urban community garden in Durham.

Greensboro Montessori School has taught environmental education since 1995 and has been permaculture gardening on its campus since 1997.

Greensboro Montessori School welcomes families from all cultures and ethnicities, with over 20 different languages spoken in our families’ homes and people of color representing 27% of our student population. The International Fair is an annual celebration of this rich diversity.

Organized and hosted by the Greensboro Montessori School Community Association (GMSCA), the 2018 International Fair is a two-week event, which kicks off on Monday, May 7. Community volunteers – students, parents, faculty, staff, and friends of the School – will share their native countries, cultures, and customs with students through individual classroom presentations. The specific countries about which our students will learn are Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, French Polynesia, Ghana, India, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Panama, Romania, and Scotland. These presentations will run through Thursday, May 17.

The 2018 International Fair will conclude with an all-school assembly the morning of Friday, May 18. Our students will enjoy a robust program featuring:

Our students, themselves, will also star in the assembly, as we invite them to wear traditional, cultural dress to school on Friday, May 18. Whether students want to share their personal cultural heritage through dress, or wear traditional clothes from a culture different from their own, we welcome all forms of cultural expression on this special day.

We look forward to a delightful two weeks commemorating our community's rich, cultural diversity and Dr. Maria Montessori’s commitment to peace education. Please ask your children to share what they’ve learned from their classroom presentations and visit our Photo Gallery in late May to enjoy the best moments from the International Fair.

Greensboro Montessori School's Junior High student council members usually plan three dance parties a year, one each in the fall, winter, and spring.  Whether an upcoming dance is your child's first or they have attended these kinds of functions before, we have some details to help you plan ahead.

When: Greensboro Montessori School dances are on a Friday night from 7 to 9:30 p.m.

Where: Dances are hosted in Greensboro Montessori School's Gymnasium

Who: Attendance is limited to currently enrolled students in grades six through nine. In general, students may not bring guests from other schools. In some instances, Greensboro Montessori School has invited other independent schools in the Independent School League to attend dances, but this is the exception to the rule.

Attire: Students may choose to dress up or wear regular clothing. Attire must follow Greensboro Montessori School's dress code. We ask all attendees to wear soft-soled shoes that will not scuff or leave marks on the gym floor.

Chaperones: All dances are chaperoned by faculty and staff from Greensboro Montessori School. On the night of the dance, parents may drop-off their child at the Gymnasium entrance at 7 p.m. and return at 9:30 p.m. when the dance is over.  The School always provides the name and cell phone number of at least one chaperone in a personal email to parents.

Cell phones: Students are permitted to bring cell phones to dances.

Entrance Fee: Students pay $5 cash at the door to attend dances.

Music: All Greensboro Montessori School dances have a DJ who is a current student. They develop a playlist based on student requests and submit this playlist for review by their faculty advisor. The faculty advisor reviews the list for content and language and approves only those songs which are age appropriate.