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Our Promise
At Atlas Academy, our mission is to build the best school possible—for our children and yours. That means we take seriously the responsibility of guiding your child’s development with care, clarity, and deep respect.
Here is our promise to you:
- We promise to provide your child with an authentic Montessori experience—one grounded in purposeful, stimulating work that builds knowledge, skills, and independence.
- We promise to get to know your child extremely well. Through careful observation and daily interaction, we strive to understand their strengths, challenges, personality, and pace—so we can support them with precision and compassion.
- We promise to prioritize your child’s comfort, happiness, and well-being. A peaceful, joyful, and emotionally safe environment is the foundation for all meaningful learning.
- We promise to communicate with you early and respectfully if your child appears to face any challenges—academic, social, or emotional. You will not be left in the dark.
- We do not promise that your child will reach a specific benchmark by a specific time. However, we do promise to do everything in our power to support your child’s progress across all curriculum areas—and to keep you involved every step of the way.
We are your partners in helping your child become a whole, capable, and confident human being.
Our Programs
Toddler
Ages 1–2
At this age, children are driven by two powerful instincts: the urge to explore and the urge to imitate. Our Montessori Toddler program is designed to support both.
Toddlers explore their world through movement and interaction. They push chairs, open and close drawers, carry objects, and test how things fit, stack, fall, or splash. They also imitate the adults around them—putting on shoes, wiping a table, or washing a dish.
At Atlas Academy, we offer toddlers a safe, beautiful, and purposeful environment filled with meaningful objects and activities they can explore. Every material is chosen with intention. Our guides model real-life tasks with calm repetition, allowing toddlers to absorb and eventually imitate those actions with growing independence.
We honor the toddler’s personality by helping them build confidence through movement, imitation, and mastery of their surroundings. Our focus is not on instruction, but on connection—between the child and their environment, and between the child and the adult who gently guides them.
Primary
Ages 3–5
Our Montessori Primary program offers children a powerful blend of freedom and structure—designed to support the developing personality of the child at a formative stage.
Children are free to choose their work from a rich, carefully prepared classroom environment. Each material is designed to engage the hand, heart, and mind—whether the child is tracing sandpaper letters, building number chains, washing a table, or drawing a map.
Yet this freedom exists within a clear structure. Each activity is taught through precise, intentional lessons. The guide models how to handle the materials, how to move through the space, how to return things to order. The children, in turn, observe closely and begin to imitate—not out of pressure, but out of interest.
To the outside observer, the result can feel almost magical: a room full of young children, working independently and purposefully, each engaged in meaningful activity—calm, focused, and confident.
This is the beginning of the child’s journey toward self-mastery. In the Primary classroom, children build the habits of independence, attention, and joy in work that will serve them for life.
Lower Elementary
Grades 1–3
The Lower Elementary years are a time of immense curiosity. Children at this stage want to understand the world—not just through doing, but through learning. Maria Montessori called this the age of the “reasoning mind,” and it’s the perfect time to offer rich content, real intellectual challenge, and space for self-driven work.
Our guides spend most of the day giving small-group lessons across a wide range of subjects. At the same time, students choose their own follow-up work and pursue it independently or with a partner. Walk into the classroom, and you’ll see first through third graders working calmly, purposefully, and independently—each on a different task, drawn from a curriculum that balances depth, freedom, and rigor.
Our math curriculum uses beautifully designed, hands-on materials to help children understand operations like multiplication and division from the inside out. Instead of just memorizing steps, students explore place value, factors, and geometry through manipulatives that make abstract concepts concrete. Children move at their own pace: those needing more support revisit foundational materials, while those ready for more move forward into advanced work—even if that means a second grader and a fourth grader receiving the same lesson.
Our language curriculum supports reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary in a deeply systematic and engaging way. Students explore phonics through spelling materials, build vocabulary through word study drawers, learn grammar through Montessori symbolization, and strengthen comprehension through rich writing prompts and novel studies.
Our cultural curriculum brings in science, history, geography, art, and literature. Children learn about the timeline of life, the early humans, and great rivers and landforms. They study reptiles and birds, work with maps, care for a class pet, listen to chapter books read aloud, and prepare an annual play for parents. As Montessori described, this is the time when we plant "seeds of interest" in the child’s personality—seeds that, when they take root, lead to deep, focused engagement with a subject.
Elementary students are eager to learn about the wider world. Our Lower Elementary program meets that hunger with freedom, structure, and meaningful work across the full landscape of knowledge.
Upper Elementary
Grades 4–6
Our Upper Elementary (UE) program serves students from grades 4 through 6. At this stage, our goal is twofold:
- To help students master the core academic skills taught in traditional schools—but at a much higher level
- To introduce them to content so rich and fascinating that most adults have never encountered it
Toward the first goal, students continue to strengthen their spelling, math facts, reading comprehension, and writing technique. They engage in all aspects of arithmetic, explore both fiction and non-fiction literature, and practice writing with purpose and structure. These are all topics found in traditional schools—the difference at Atlas is how they are presented: in a way that matches each child’s ability and interest, using beautifully designed, hands-on materials. This approach leads to deeper understanding, higher quality output, and real joy in learning.
Toward the second goal, we dive into ambitious, interdisciplinary studies that most adults were never offered:
- In observational astronomy, students use digital tools like Stellarium to answer questions such as: How long does it take Jupiter to pass through the zodiac constellations? How long does Mars take to complete its retrograde pattern?
- In geometry, students construct visual proofs—like the geometric demonstration of the Pythagorean Theorem.
- In grammar and sentence analysis, they learn to diagram sentences in depth, identifying subject, predicate, objects, and modifiers.
- In alternative number systems, students perform arithmetic in non-decimal bases—like the duodecimal system—revealing the nature of place value and number theory.
Our central task at this level is to help students construct a passionate, powerful intelligence. We want them not just to “know things,” but to experience mastery, insight, and awe. As Maria Montessori wrote:
“We claim that the average boy or girl of twelve who has been educated till then at one of our schools knows at least as much as the finished High School product of several years’ seniority.”
Think of that: an 8th grader who is more intellectually advanced than a typical high school graduate—and who is also emotionally healthy, good-natured, and socially responsible. That’s our aim. And right now, we’re right on track.
Some projects from this year:
- Labeling every bone on a full human skeleton model
- Squaring the 8-digit number 34,621,572
- Making a book of 28 complex sentence diagrams.
- Creating a giant poster map of the gods of Mount Olympus
- Building a robot designed to deliver a Polar Seltzer to Mr. G
These aren’t assignments—they’re chosen challenges. That’s the kind of intelligence we’re building here: self-directed, precise, joyful, and real.
