A Community Built to Nurture Each Student’s Unique Journey

Mississippi Microschool is a small secular learning community providing personalized, student-led education in an emotionally nurturing environment.

Program Details

  • under development

The School Day

In the classroom you will see:

  • First priority given to well-being

  • Personalized academic help

  • Students thriving through interest-driven work

The school day begins with drop-off in our front sunroom between 9:20-9:30am, which is available to families for as long as needed, to gently transition their child into school. Students may snack, hug their caregivers, put away their backpacks, and head into the classroom as they are ready.

The students have free movement in the classroom all day to choose the work that inspires them and rest as needed. The first three hours of the day is similar to a Montessori work period. Students are encouraged to practice the work that is most challenging to them, while teachers offer lessons and support. On nice days, we open the doors between the classroom and the yard, and students are welcome to work outside, or just feel the fresh air as they stay comfortably inside. 

At 12:30, students grab their lunches and eat together. Students are welcome to eat fast and then play, to finish their work and then eat, or to snuggle next to a teacher. Around 1:00pm, we clean-up the lunch area together and a teacher invites the students to play a game together – either outside if it’s nice, or in the sunroom. Students can opt-out of the game and continue eating or return to classroom work, if they prefer.

For the last hour of the day (1:30-2:30), we offer a variety of options. Most days, a teacher will read a book aloud to those interested. Another teacher may lead a group through a project-based lesson. Other students will spend this hour focused on pursuing their special interests. And as often as we can, we welcome volunteers into the classroom to demonstrate their interests. This could be anything from sharing a coin collection, offering a talk on sewer system management or demonstrating how to make felted animals. Students should be picked up at 2:30. Between 2:00-3:00 we welcome families to socialize in the sunroom.

Curriculum

Our holistic, child-centered approach consists of four main components: social-emotional health, interest pursuit, mathematics, and language arts. Support in each of these areas is provided all day long with teachers giving more or less structure for each child depending on their needs. We’ve set up our environment and routine in a way that helps students meet their own unique needs and pursue their special interests either independently or with help. Learning happens when students (1) feel ok, and (2) are interested, so that’s how we prioritize our classroom. With these priorities in mind, learning guides provide personalized daily help to ensure students progress in the core areas necessary for any interest pursuit.

Support of social-emotional health is built into the flexible routine of the classroom, which allows teachers to capture moments for social-emotional learning. Activities for self care that are always in the classroom include: headphones, resting spots and both small and large motor materials. Teachers also lead lunch discussions and after lunch social games with the explicit goal of fostering and developing social and emotional skills.

Acedemics are taught through personalized one-on-one and small group instruction provided by the guides. Goal-setting and assessment is a collaborative and ongoing process between teacher, student, and family. Families can email teachers directly and meet in-person as needed to discuss student progress. For lessons, teachers draw from the Montessori curriculum, their own specific training and experiences, and any other sources brought in to meet particular student needs. 

Our interest-pursuit curriculum component consists of an ever-growing library of the most beginner-friendly books on every subject we can think of, materials in the classroom that make exploring crafts, science, and technology accessible to students, and explicit teacher and volunteer modeling of their own interest pursuits. We provide a rich educational milieu for the students, then let them free to play, explore, read, watch, and wonder. We observe our students, providing new materials, new inspiration, and as much help as is needed.

Step inside the classroom…

If you step inside our classroom, you will see students engaging in a whole manner of activities. Some students will be engaged in academic activities with an adult, a peer, or on their own. For example, one student might be practicing reading one-on-one with a teacher and two other students might be jumping down a number line they created with another teacher. We have a low student:teacher ratio, so each student is given daily personalized attention to progress their academic goals. 

However, academic work isn’t always as obviously practiced as in those first two examples. You might also see one student giggling as they frantically draw their own silly comic strip, and another two students zooming around math cubes they’ve built into space ships. We’ve stocked our room with materials that inspire students to play and be creative, and which also elicit natural learning. Some students learn more than we could ever teach them when they are given the tools and space to build their own understanding through exploration and creative work. We set up the environment to encourage learning, and then we step back and allow the students freedom to follow their internal drives.

But what about the other half of the class? What are they doing if not academics? A few students are busy recharging: hiding away in nooks with books, music on headphones, or laying on the floor within earshot of an academic lesson, silently absorbing without the stress of full engagement. We prioritize well-being over academics. We believe that the most important goal is that the students are simply ok, and when a student is not ok, helping them be ok is our only focus. Learning how to manage our emotions and how to take care of each other is as fundamental to our educational philosophy as literacy or numeracy.

The remaining few students are independently engaging in what we call “interest work.” One student is out on the patio shoveling snow, one is making a clay sculpture, one is knitting, and one is working on a proposal for a class pet. These students are each in a state of flow: completely focused on their work, they have set aside all self-consciousness and are being filled by the euphoria of their work. The positive experience of being in flow carries over into the rest of their lives, increasing happiness, creativity, intrinsic motivation, and emotional regulation. Furthermore, through interest work students build real, valuable skills, which build their sense of worth and their sense of purpose. We encourage our students to follow their interests because the pride and satisfaction of work well done is of value greater than the work itself.