Absorbent Minds Montessori School- Tallmadge

My son went to Absorbent Minds for preschool and kindergarten (3 years total). Once he graduated from kindergarten we had to find a new school since at the time Absorbent Minds did not offer an elementary program. Now I am over-joyed that Brandy has opened a new school in Tallmadge. This school is a blessing to the community and to all of us looking for an alternative schooling option for our children. I have recommended countless families to Absorbent Minds over the last few years and everyone has been just as pleased. Brandy, Kelly and all the staff are amazing; the energy and the care that they put into their school can be "felt" as soon as you walk through the doors. Hopefully you get the chance to "feel" it too!!

We enrolled our son when he was 5 years old. Within one year he developed enormous amount of skills and responsibilities, self- esteem and he continued challenging him self to learn even more. We as parents and our son as student of this school absolutely love this type of education. Integration of children of different ages in same classroom provided him with level of motivation we were absolutely surprised by. He has desires as third grader to learn and know as much as fifth grader, even though he understands it is few years ahead of his level. Needles to say, we have enrolled our daughter at the same school within one year of our son attending. And, just as our son, she is showing same results. She was actually only 3 when she started and she loved it from day! In addition, we are so happy with Absorbent Minds Montessori School that we will be enrolling our third child in same school as soon as he turns 3 years old.

I was a former student from this school, going here from preschool to a part of elementary school. Keep in mind the school may have changed science my time there, so take this all with a grain of salt. My parents sent me beck to the elementary program after the great experiences we had during preschool here. Though preschool was great, teaching me good fundamentals, social skills, and overall important things for small children to learn, I can’t say the same about the elementary school. The point of Montessori schools is to have the child be free and to discover themselves, with hands on methods and other mind nurturing activities. Now don’t get me wrong, this WAS a Montessori school, and we got to be “free”. We were a little too free, and spent lots of our time having drawing contests or finger knitting, as opposed to learning math and other important fundamentals. The will to learn was something we had to build up, and some people never found that. Meaning everyday was practically free time, despite the “meetings” we had with out teacher. Another thing that upset me at the time, was that we were mixed within many grades. 1-5 if I remember correctly. I always had a low toleration of younger children, and this just made it worse. They distracted me and just upset me in general. There wasn’t too many other options though, considering we were in a small church and had limited rooms. Since this is a relatively small school, they had sat rules. We made a “constitution”, and participated in a journal entry at the end of everyday. We learned cursive, started doing research, played the recorders, and many other things. These were by far some of my best days, no lying. But every year I happened to have a different teacher. This is most likely because the school was just starting out, and things were still not stable and set-in-stone. But it was confusing and new every year. Every teacher had different policies, and some were very ridiculous. We had to share everything, including pencils. (Yes, with people who chewed the erasers off and bit the pencils) so we found ways to hid our pencils. I get the sharing thing, but that can be a bit...gross. At least I’m skilled in hiding pencils, so that’s one thing to put on my resume, great. All in all, the school was just okay. I didn’t learn much, and things were kind of unprofessional. I feel like I would have been just as good off in a cheap public school, but hey, I’m here either way. I hope this helped!