Failure is NOT a bad word! It could be the best gift you give to your child!
What?!?
Join the PTO for Montessori Parents in Action (MPIA) this Friday, November 10 from 8:30-10:00 for an open discussion on the book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed with specific focus on Part 1 of the book “Failure: A Most Valuable Parenting Tool.”
Please come even if you have not had the opportunity to read the book. This is such an important topic as many parents struggle with deciding on when to step in to help a child and when to allow a child to fail and learn from that failure. See below to learn more about this worthwhile book to read and join in the conversation!!!
In this book, Jessica Lahey delves into modern parenting and the tendencies towards overprotectiveness: parents who run home to retrieve forgotten homework assignments, deliver forgotten lunches to school, mastermind children’s friendships and interfere on the playing field. Children are robbed of the opportunity to experience failure and in turn the opportunity to learn from failure and learn to solve their own problems.
Jessica writes, “Out of love and desire to protect our children’s self-esteem, we have bulldozed every uncomfortable bump and obstacle out of the way, clearing the manicured path we hoped would lead to success and happiness. Unfortunately, in doing so we have deprived our children of the most important lessons of childhood. The setbacks, mistakes, miscalculations, and failures we have shoved out of our children’s way are the very experiences that teach them how to be resourceful, persistent, innovative and resilient citizens of this world.” Additionally, she writes “In order to help children make the most of their education, parents must begin to relinquish control and focus on three goals: embracing opportunities to fail, finding ways to learn from that failure, and creating positive home/school relationships.”
We hope you will join us for a group discussion of this well written and thought-provoking book.
Please join the Primary teachers for a Parent Workshop exploring the Montessori math curriculum this Thursday, November 9 from 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. This workshop will help parents understand the sequence of the Primary math curriculum as well as become familiar with many of the math manipulatives.
We are honored that Ted has accepted our invitation to come to the Upstate and speak to the Greenville community. For more information on Ted and how he helps boys reach their full potential as men, visit his website at 
Thank you to all of the parent volunteers who worked so hard on Community Day to help make our campus look so beautiful! We truly appreciate the parents, students, and faculty coming together to accomplish so many much-needed jobs around the campus and in the classrooms.
You can see many more pictures from this fun day on our private website on the school homepage. A special thank you to FOA’s official photographer, Guy Adamson of Guy Adamson Photography, for getting some great shots of all the hard workers.
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I was asked to lead a three-day Montessori Leadership Seminar with Dr. Paul Epstein, sponsored by the Polish Montessori Institute in March. Before beginning the seminar, I had the opportunity to tour the city and visit several Montessori schools. My observations were that Poland was a fascinating mix of the old and new. Since freeing themselves from communist rule in 1989, they have emerged as a modern, creative and entrepreneurial force in all areas of growth. Their cities have been rebuilt and areas like the old town, which used to have only one restaurant under the communist regime, is now blooming with all types of innovative cuisines.
As an SCMA Board Member, I have also seen the same type of growth explosion in my own state in Montessori education. South Carolina currently holds the lead in Montessori schools in the United States. Aside from touring their beautiful facilities, learning about the quality of their educational development, and experiencing their thirst for improving Montessori in Poland… it was a truly heartwarming experience for me. The educators who attended the 3-day Montessori seminar were anxious to learn practical details about running a school as well as new best practices for a Montessori school. I enjoyed giving presentations on brain research and the connections between resilience, grit, happiness, and gratitude and how that can improve learning and school guidance. I received such positive feedback throughout my three days of teaching; it leaves me with thoughts of wanting to return to Poland to share more.
This year our Five Oaks Middle School Model United Nations group included 24 middle school participants, the largest number to have taken part from Five Oaks yet. These 24 students represented 10 countries and each group researched their country’s culture, celebrations, government, currency and other important details. Using these details, they created display boards and selected an issue their country faced and wrote a paper detailing the issue along with an in-depth solution to that specific problem.
These months of work each year culminate in a two-day conference where students present their ideas to rooms of peers for debate and discussion. Groups who are ranked highly by their peers in terms of being prepared, presenting debatable and effective solutions and speaking well, progress to speak in front of larger groups of students in General Assembly or Plenary. In General Assembly, two sessions are held simultaneously and all students in attendance are sorted into one of the groups to hear certain proposals again and debate them in this larger setting. In Plenary, all students attend a single session and hear a few of the groups present and debate their topics in front of the whole convention. Each time that students debate their proposals, the groups they present to vote to pass or deny the resolution. Of the Plenary groups that pass, they get one additional opportunity to share their issue and solution and those few final proposals are ranked in order of importance.
Typically one group is selected as having the issue of the greatest importance and possible solution and that group receives a $500 donation to a charity of their choosing related to the topic they researched so thoroughly. This year, two groups were selected and both were from Five Oaks! Bangladesh, represented by Emily Meade, Brigitte Pinochet, and Grace Ireland was one of those groups and they spoke on the issue of rampant malnutrition in their country. Ethiopia was the other group that took this top honor and was represented by Ranjan Jindal, Jefferson Summers and Gabrielle McGraw speaking on the topic of research-based effective farming practices.
The group representing Bangladesh also received an award for “Outstanding Proposal” which is awarded by a panel of community members who assess the proposals prior to conference time with all student names and school identifying markers removed. Aside from the groups who made it to Plenary, three other Five Oaks groups made it to General Assembly and they were Burkina Faso (represented by Ariella Alfieri, Smith Summers, and Ben VanPelt), Brazil (represented by Caitlyn White and Ariana Alexiou) and Germany (represented by Laney McKinney, Hal Freeland, and Brooke Garrett).
Five Oaks Academy is pleased to announce that we are participating in the 3rd Annual iMAGINE Upstate STEAM Festival on April 1 from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm in Greenville’s beautiful West End. This is a free event and open to all ages!
