The Story of Dogwood Montessori

Welcome to Dogwood Montessori!

This is the story of how Dogwood Montessori has evolved since 2000. I hope you will join me as I step back and journey forward to what it will become.

The First Years:

I discovered my passion in the year 2000 when I went to the Maryland Center for Montessori Studies in Baltimore. There I received my Montessori Primary training and spent the next 3 years teaching in the Red Door at Bay Montessori School in Lexington Park.

I knew I had found my passion when I woke one morning with my first migraine since I started teaching. I was so sick - I knew I could not spend the morning with 26 young preschoolers and survive! However, I decided to go into school anyway and prep the classroom for the day, then tell my co-teacher I would need to go home and sleep off this headache.

I began prepping the classroom, the first children started to arrive, and I did not think about my headache again until about mid-morning when - to my utter surprise - I realized it was gone! That’s when I knew I was where I belonged.

Maria Montessori says, when you find your passion it will energize you, and that is what it does for me!

In the summer of 2004, we moved to Bealeton, VA; and because there was no Montessori school in the area, I opened my own Primary classroom, named "Dogwood Montessori," at Faith Christian Fellowship in the basement of the church. I modeled it after the Red Door classroom where I had previously worked, and it operated there for one year.

Dogwood Montessori then moved to Bealeton, and became licensed as a Virginia State Family Day Home. Dogwood operated successfully as a Primary classroom for 12  wonderful children. During those three years I was introduced to what would become my second passion - The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd! Family concerns took us back to Maryland and Dogwood Montessori closed its doors.

I returned and spent the next four years in the classroom I had left — the Red Door at Bay Montessori School in Lexington Park, MD. I replaced the teacher who had replaced me!

My next year included two assignments: the first was bringing Montessori to a 3-year-old classroom in a play-based environment called Annie’s Early Learning Center and in the second I joined a Toddler team at Starmaker Learning Center, a Montessori school in California, MD.

This is when my passion went to the next level. (To be continued…)