Studio Demo · Fictional school — Montessori Makers School is a fictional school built by Montessori Makers Studio
Build yours →Home / Our Program / Extensions
Spanish, music, art, and the garden.
Specialist work woven into the week rather than bolted onto it, taught by practicing artists, musicians, and gardeners who know the Montessori sequence.
4
Extension specialists
2×
Spanish sessions weekly
1/8
Acre under cultivation
K–6
Studio art for every level
Spanish
Twice a week, from age three, entirely in Spanish.
Our Spanish specialist works inside the classroom rather than pulling children out of it, and speaks no English during her sessions. In Primary this looks like songs, snack, and materials the children already know, renamed. By Upper Elementary it is conversation, reading, and written work.
The point is not fluency by twelve, though some children get close. It is that a second language stops being a school subject and becomes a normal way that some people talk.
Music & studio art
Taught by people who still practice.
Our music specialist plays in a working ensemble; our studio art teacher shows in Chicago galleries. Children get the tone bells and rhythm work in Primary, choir and instrumental options in Elementary, and a studio with real materials rather than craft-kit substitutes.
Art in the Elementary years connects directly to the Great Lessons — the timeline of life gets illustrated, the study of civilisations gets built. The work is displayed, not sent home in a folder.
The garden
An eighth of an acre, in Lincoln Park, kept by children.
The garden runs on a real calendar with real consequences. Seeds get started in February under lights in the Upper Elementary room. Beds get turned in April. Produce goes to the lunch program in September, and the ledger has to balance.
It is also where a great deal of science happens: soil chemistry, pollination, weather records kept over three years, and the occasional hard lesson about squirrels.
The rhythm
What a week actually looks like.
Specialists come into the classroom on a fixed weekly rhythm, so extension work sits inside the cycle rather than interrupting it.
On the shelves
Four things you would see on a visit.
Tone Bells
Pitch isolated the same way dimension is in the Pink Tower
The Studio
Clay, printmaking, and paint — real materials, no kits
Seed Ledger
Three years of germination records, kept by the children
Weather Station
Daily readings on the roof since 2019
From a family
“My son explained crop rotation to me over dinner. He is eight. He had been arguing about it with another eight-year-old all week.”
The Bertrand Family
Lower Elementary, since 2022
The continuum
