About
Our School
Oakland Montessori School welcomes children and families from diverse cultural backgrounds regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, physical or mental differences, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, or other identities. We invite interested, involved families to join our diverse community.
What Guides Us
Creativity
Inside and outside, our children explore, discover, learn, and play. We offer lots of room to spread out inside and outside. Our spacious rooms give everyone enough room to work and explore, and combine large windows that let children look out with cozy corners to keep quiet in. Our expansive yard, sandboxes, trees, gardens, and play structures provide hours of creation and exploration and welcomes the sun all day long.
Confidence
We offer appropriately sized furniture, cooking supplies, and couches: our entire environment is designed so it fits the children. Our children work and play together, teaching each other, learning from each other, sharing ideas, discovering how to get along, and solving problems as they arise. We prepare food daily, for ourselves and each other. Our parents, friends, and families bring their passion and knowledge to school to share with everyone. It is not uncommon to see two-year-olds setting the table for snack, three-year-olds in our school “reading” to others, and four-year-olds giving lessons to younger children. But school is a community for more than just the children. We view our relationship with parents and extended family as a partnership, working together for the benefit of your child and their friends. Outside of that, our entire neighborhood is a place of learning, from Dimond Park, to Dimond Library, to walking to the grocery store.
Independence
We make sure children have the opportunity to do everything for themselves: make snack and serve it, clean up after themselves and each other, including any accidental spills. The children grow flowers in the garden to make our classroom beautiful, grind wheat for making bread for our snack, and run circle for themselves when teachers move on to other lessons.
Trust
We realize that every child is unique and thrives when their individuality is recognized and they are provided with a secure emotional foundation. We encourage children to develop their independence, concentration, and critical thinking, and also teach them to care for their community, their environment, and their friends. We help prepare children for the future with confidence, curiosity, and knowledge that they can trust themselves to meet future challenges. The qualities developed at this age are a foundation for future learning and living, and come about through modeling, discussion, and support as well as direct and indirect teaching. Our children learn to build community from their engaged parents and teachers, through conversations and lessons about caring for their surroundings and their friends, and by developing their own ideas.
The child leads
Making choices allows children to direct their own attention in what absorbs them; educators don’t need to guess what interests the child. When each child can pick what they are interested in today, this week, or this month, they can direct their own education in a powerful way as they develop their own independence, assessment of difficulty, and learning approach. We encourage each child to move and learn at their own pace because we know that learning happens at every moment.
WHAT People are saying
Parent Review
"Our son attended OMS for 3 years and during that time we found the staff to be very attentive to his ever adapting needs from toddlerhood to childhood. We were fond of OMS from the beginning, in part because of its large open outdoor space, as our son needs ample room to explore and play in the sunlight. The Montessori school style suited our child’s needs well as it provided structure and education while also introducing music, arts, gymnastics and lots of peer-to-peer interactions. For our son, he had some struggles with various areas of growth but the educators were constantly informing us of how he was doing, strategies they were employing to help him advance, encouraging tools to try at home and working closely with us to monitor his progress. Overall, we’ve been impressed by their dedication to help our child and others grow as engaged, intelligent and sociable little humans. We feel that our son is thriving and we would happily recommend OMS. We are grateful for this school and the time our son spent time there as he forged healthy relationships with both the educators and fellow students."
— Melissa