Montessori School

Before scoffing, consider this: you’ve put in a full day at your job, but then your boss gives you three hours of additional work to take home and do each night. How would you feel about that? Would it make you enjoy your job more, or would you begin to resent the lack of balance in your life? Essentially, that’s what we expect of children. We tell them that their “job” is going to school, but then after they have done that all day long, we expect them to sit for hours more work at home too. Studies have shown no academic benefit to giving children homework until middle school, and then the returns diminish after about an hour of work. There simply isn’t data to support giving homework for elementary aged children and below.

The purpose of our homework approach is for children to constantly continue learning, and to reinforce the idea that when we leave St. Peter’s Montessori each day, our education for life continues. We have extensively researched how to best nurture developing children in their second plane of development (from six- to twelve-years-old) and constructed a homework plan accordingly.

Bonnie Shearer, Director
St Peter’s Montessori School
Phone: (623) 935-7737
montessori@stpetersaz.com