Middle School
Extended day and Full day programs available.
Ages: 12 years-15 years
The 7th and 8th grade years encompass a time of rapid growth and change in the early adolescent. Our middle school program at Montessori Academy of North Texas focuses on the empowerment of adolescents through the encouragement of both individual "response-ability" and cooperative skills.
Our program meets the needs of the adolescent by offering a smaller, developmentally-responsive learning environment with opportunity for students to build meaningful relationships with peers and teachers.
There is a great emphasis on individual student accountability, organization, and responsibility for work while also fostering the development of a community within the classroom and the need to mutually respect, support, and honor one another.
Cooperative skills are enhanced through community service, community building activities (such as the ROPES course) and cross-age teaching. Students participate in internships. Students interact in student government committees, and they present science, history and computer lessons to other MANT students. Class businesses allow students to exercise cooperative and practical applications of skills. Students also plan monthly socials where they may attend plays, movies, or dances.
The middle school year is divided into five thematic cycles. These cycles are each approximately six weeks long, and they integrate the given theme into all of the disciplines of study. Seventh and eighth graders work both cooperatively and collaboratively. Curriculum integrates Natural World (the Sciences), Social World (the Humanities), Personal World, Literacy, Grammar Vocabulary, Math, and the Humanities. Types of activities target all of the learning modalities, and they are balanced among individual, small group, and class projects, lessons, and/or activities.
All subjects are interrelated, and large blocks of thinking time allow for the emerging cognitive ability to explore possibilities and ideas. Curriculum is interdisciplinary and multi-stranded, and applications to life are emphasized in each subject area.
Between each cycle, students participate in an Immersion Week. During these weeks throughout the school year, students have the opportunity to become immersed in activities such as community service projects, service learning or internships, musical performances, and more. Often it is in these moments that some of the best memories are made and the most learning occurs. The world is opened up to the adolescents as they are given a chance to see outside of themselves, to experience new challenges, and to offer a helping hand to neighbors.
Please Click here to find out information on the Curriculum your child will be taught at MANT.
"There is only one thing that education can take as a sure guide, and that is the personality of the children who are to be educated . . . [and adolescence] . . . is the time, the "sensitive period" when they should develop the most noble characteristics that prepare a man to be social, that is to say, a sense of justice and a sense of personal dignity . . . this is the time when the social man is created."
-Maria Montessori
