Middle School
Young Adults Ages 12 to 15 Years Old
Montessori Middle School: Land-Based Learning for Adolescents
At Oak Farm Montessori School, our land-based Middle School environment offers students a unique opportunity to prepare their own space and explore their emerging identity. This stage builds on the "freedom through discipline" developed in earlier Montessori years and invites students to ask essential questions: What can I do? What are my strengths? What is my place in the world?
With the land as their classroom, students engage in hands-on learning while continuing their academic studies. They are offered meaningful choices that promote self-discovery, such as planting gardens, raising animals, baking, cooking meals, managing a market, designing spaces, writing, dancing, and more.
Through these experiences, guided by supportive teachers, students begin to understand their abilities, cultivate responsibility, and find purpose. This journey fosters what Dr. Montessori called valorization: a sense of self-worth, capability, and belonging in the broader community.
Community
Our Connections to the World
We believe that students uncover their cosmic purpose by exploring connections between their school, local, national, and global communities. Past experiences, from local service at nursing homes and food banks to broader travel in New York City, the Smoky Mountains, and Canada, support adolescents in observing society, engaging with the world, and pursuing purposeful, meaningful work.
Erdkinder
Our Farm
The farm fosters unity, purpose, and meaning within our community. As a core part of our curriculum, it offers hands-on opportunities to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and practical life skills. Working with animals and the land cultivates empathy, environmental responsibility, and sustainable practices, while instilling habits of care and perseverance that connect students to the well-being of the greater community.
Microeconomy
The Microeconomy program is a student-run community business that empowers adolescents to make collective economic decisions while developing skills in budgeting, management, sales, and labor alongside farm work. It also cultivates essential soft skills such as communication, professionalism, teamwork, adaptability, and integrity through meaningful, real-world experiences.
Academics
We believe that a rigorous study of academics stimulates, challenges, and ultimately engages the students’ intellectual sense of history, the world, society, and their personal lives. It also provides opportunity for creativity and critical thinking.
The integration of skill work, independent endeavors, and group projects in and out of the classroom prepares students for their next level of education and gives them the experiences of self-discipline and cooperation so necessary in today’s world.
