1. Home
  2. Programs
  3. Adolescent Community

Adolescent Scheduling Options

Program Hours: approximately 8:15am-3:15pm

Before-School Care: 7:30am

After-School Care: 4:15pm, 5:00pm, or 5:30pm

School Year: August – June

After-School Activities are available seasonally based on availability.

Connect with Us

Adolescent Community

7th and 8th grade

Adolescence is an age of great social development, an age of critical thinking and re-evaluation, and a period of self-concern and self-assessment. It is the transition from childhood to adulthood. Above all, adolescence is like an odyssey where the adolescent tries to find their place in the world.

The Greenspring Montessori Adolescent Community is the culmination of the child’s experience as a Montessori student. This unique program is designed to meet and serve the needs of the adolescent during this period of tremendous personal growth and change.

Students are expected to bring a high level of independence and self-direction, comfort with collaborative work, and a love of learning. The students treat each other with respect and are comfortable with the knowledge that each person has different strengths and challenges.

“Above all, it is the education of adolescents that is important, because adolescence is the time when the child enters on the state of manhood and becomes a member of society.”

– Dr. Maria Montessori

Personal Dignity, Social Justice, and Belonging

The positive sense of belonging is nurtured through weekly council meetings run by the students, responsibilities that adequately match the capabilities of the adolescent, and through work that has a clear purpose. The adolescents work side-by-side with an increased number of adults, to engage in the immediate needs of the community: weeding the garden, feeding the animals, caring for their own community spaces, doing volunteer work in the greater Baltimore community, lobbying and writing letters to representatives, and more.

Students are advocates of their own learning

Montessori adolescents continue to learn without letter grades as in all of our Montessori programs. Conversations with the Guides and written remarks on papers complement the students’ learning and autonomy. The mixed-age class supports each student in applying themself in a unique way to a group experience. To work collaboratively, the adolescents have a schedule to work within the same curriculum area at the same time. Longer blocks of time are devoted for subject areas such as Occupations and Humanities, Sciences, and Creative Expression, allowing enough time for each student to also follow personal threads of interest.

The adolescent curriculum is all about community

The Montessori Adolescent Community offers lessons with practical applications that allow students to engage with their community. Projects such as monitoring the neighborhood watershed, building and maintaining a large garden, or baking bread, are real world opportunities for many lessons in science, language arts, and practical life skills. Students work as a group to run a business – the Adolescent Microeconomy – as their first direct experiences of the economic connections in society. The success of earning money in exchange for services to their community is a strong source of validation for the adolescent’s skills and contributions.

 

Explore all that Greenspring has to offer.

Rcent Posts from our Adolescent Community

School Partnership with Montessori Lancaster in Mérida, Yucatán

School Partnership with Montessori Lancaster in Mérida, Yucatán

We are happy to announce an exciting new partnership with Montessori Lancaster in Mérida, Yucatán in Mexico. We have been diligently working for two years to identify and partner with an established Montessori school in Latin America to provide children and...

Fall Adolescent Odyssey to East Hill Farm

Fall Adolescent Odyssey to East Hill Farm

In early October, our Adolescents ventured to East Hill Farm in New Hampshire for an immersive Fall Odyssey trip. The Farm is located at the base of Mount Monadnock on 150 acres where they raise heritage breed cows, goats, and pigs along with horses, sheep, chickens,...

2023 Winter Enrichment Update

2023 Winter Enrichment Update

Scroll through this post to see what our students have been up to in our Enrichment classes this winter. Art Enrichment Ms. Jackie Dorr This semester Lower Elementary students have been learning how to blend oil pastels while studying the anatomy of the earth.  Both...

Our Adolescents’ Visit to the Mexican Cultural Institute

Our Adolescents’ Visit to the Mexican Cultural Institute

For Spanish enrichment, the Adolescent Community visited the Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington, DC this month. We have been studying the murals and researching the themes and iconography chosen by the artist Roberto Cueva del Río. Our tour of the Institute was...