About MMC
Montessori Moppet Centre, Inc. is a non-denominational school affiliated with, and licensed by, American Montessori Society. All teachers, assistants and administrators hold college degrees and are licensed/certified at the level in which they teach. (Montessori certification is earned through post-graduate training at a Montessori Training School or through a university-based Masters program.) MMC was incorporated in 1981, and is located in the main-floor school wing of Naperville Christian Church, from whom we have rented classrooms since 1981. In addition to the two classrooms, we enjoy the use of a large playground and supervised nature walks in the adjacent forest preserve.
Our goal is to help each child develop physically, socially, emotionally and academically to their full potential while promoting respect, courtesy and human decency.
Montessori Education
The Montessori system is both a philosophy of child growth and a rationale for guiding such growth. It is based on the child's developmental needs for freedom within limits and a carefully prepared environment which guarantees exposure to materials and experiences through which to develop intelligence as well as physical and psychological abilities. It is designed to take full advantage of the self-motivation and unique ability of children to develop their own capabilities. The child needs adults to expose him/her to the possibilities of his/her life, but the child must direct his/her response to those possibilities.
Premises of Montessori education are:
1) Children are to be respected as different from adults, and as individuals who differ from each other.
2)The child possesses unusual sensitivity and mental powers for absorbing and learning from his/her environment that are unlike those of the adult both in quality and capacity.
3) The most important years of growth are the first six years of life when unconscious learning is gradually brought to the conscious level.
4) The child has a deep love and need for purposeful work. He/she works, however, not as an adult for profit and completion of a job, but for the sake of the activity itself. It is this activity which accomplishes for the child his/her most important goal: the development of him/herself--- his/her mental, physical, and psychological powers.
In short, the goals of Montessori for children are several: it encourages self-discipline, self-knowledge, and independence, as well as enthusiasm for learning, an organized approach to problem-solving, and academic skills.