Elementary students at Greensboro Montessori School shine bright with a love of learning and eagerness to come to school. They also have unique developmental needs as they experience the core years of their childhood.

The Elementary years (ages 6 to 12) are a time of great physical and mental strength. Children's bodies change dramatically in height and weight, and they get in their first adult teeth. Their character also strengthens as they become aware of themselves in relationship to others. This period is highlighted by the marked development of a new social instinct. The children are drawn to interact socially and to seek one another’s company. Additionally they are compelled to examine the rightness and wrongness of social interactions. Mentally the children become conceptual explorers. They develop their powers of reasoning, abstraction, and imagination. During these years, children are capable of accomplishing great mental work and accumulating a tremendous store of cultural information.

Greensboro Montessori School's Elementary curriculum is designed to meet these emerging interests and needs and is organized around the big questions that fire the elementary child’s imagination: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why is life on Earth this way? This illustrates the unique framework of the Montessori Elementary program known as Cosmic Education — simply defined as helping the child place themselves in context in the universe and how they are related to history and ecology of the Earth.

Our Elementary program is organized around Dr. Maria Montessori’s second plane of development spanning ages 6 to 12. Within this plane are two three-year developmental cycles which we accommodate in two divisions:

• Lower Elementary (also known as Elementary I) includes first, second, and third graders and is a period of intense change and growth.
• Upper Elementary (also know as Elementary II) includes fourth, fifth, and sixth graders and is a period of understanding and assimilation.

Unlike conventional education, which separates students by grade level, our multiage classrooms position students who are reaching maturity within their three-year developmental cycle as leaders within their community.

Also different from conventional education — which separates topics within subjects and covers them once at a certain grade level — Montessori’s integrated, thematic approach to learning ties together separate disciplines throughout the entire three-year developmental cycle. The curriculum can be envisioned as a spiral with opportunities for students to revisit topics and skills many times with increasing depth and breadth as they grow older. This integration allows students to develop at their own pace, ensuring mastery of a concept before moving on to the next lesson. Students learn to pace themselves using a developmentally appropriate work plan, which is designed by the teachers with each individual student's needs in mind. How quickly a student moves through the curriculum is influenced by their interests and strengths.