A small private school nestled in Slingerlands is celebrating its 15th anniversary by growing and adding pre-K programming to its curriculum.
The Bethlehem Children’s School, a Montessori school on Fisher Boulevard, is welcoming to its faculty Emmy Cole, who will be teaching the school’s youngest learners. It’s the latest development for this tight-knit school that’s turned a former home into intimate, homey classrooms room by room over the years. Enrollment has never been above 34, but the school’s Board of Directors is hoping it will increase with the addition of pre-K and kindergarten classes this fall.
“We want to stop being the hidden secret of Delmar,” said Julie Darling, president on the school’s Board of Directors and a parent of one of the first children to be enrolled at the school when it opened in 1995.
Cole has been teaching for 13 years, the last six in a Montessori school. She’s ecstatic to be broaching a whole new age group at the Children’s School, and has already set up her classroom for an interactive, exploratory approach to learning.
“In this classroom, there will be a lot of hands-on work,” Cole said. “It becomes a very busy classroom, with the kids doing what interests them, with my guidance. I observe and I watch, and I even change materials based on what I might see the children doing.”
Students will focus on the core categories of education — language skills, math, science, etc. — but Cole plans to put a great focus on sensory experiences. For example, students might work with movable letters in learning the alphabet and simple words, so they can manipulate the objects themselves. Especially for small children, the motor skills to wield a pencil might not be there, but the curiosity is.
“They can start putting letters together for formation of that word, which of course leads to reading,” Cole said. “That’s another theory, that working with the hands will help the brain retain that information.”
This open-ended approach to education is at the core of the Montessori practice, and providing it to a small community was the reason behind the school’s formation. A small group of parents founded the school after their children graduated from the Blossoms Montessori Learning school in Delmar’s pre-K program.
“We became friends and our children became friends, and we just wanted that to continue,” Darling said.
And continue it has. Darling said many members of the school’s first class are still in touch with one another, even as they graduated from college this spring. She said it’s clear their education has served them well as they pursue learning at prestigious institutions, and it has stuck with them because school was a fun activity for her kids, not work.
“I think it keeps the kids’ minds really involved in what they’re going to learn … nothing is hard because then it’s just interesting,” she said.
The school meets all the state standards when it comes to education, and while being small presents some challenges, there are also opportunities. All the students of the school will be able to take advantage of special projects, for example, including an ongoing one to build a greenhouse out of plastic bottles.
It was designed by Jeff Chaney, an architect with the Malta-based M+W Group, and has been made possible by a grant from General Electric, as well as 2,000 empty 2-liter plastic bottles donated by Hannaford Supermarkets.
The school will be planting foods in the greenhouse and incorporating them into the curriculum for some classes. When it comes to the younger kids, the wonder of taking something directly from earth to table is a powerful lesson on its own, said Darling.
The Bethlehem Children’s School has five full-time and three part-time teachers on staff. The school is enrolling for the fall semester. For more information, call 478-0224 or visit bethlehemchildrensschool.com.
The school will hold an open house on Saturday, Aug. 20, from noon to 4 p.m.
