Other Common Questions
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The Hills Montessori is locally owned and operated by a Omaha family who was struggling with finding quality care for thier young children, over 15 years ago. These parents had a dream of providing Omaha families with a unique childcare experience where staff not only provided exceptional daily care but also treated each child and parent as family!
Our two locations were designed to feel like home which is warm and friendly, While the Hills Montessori is not perfect our goal is to be a child's home-away-from home and everything we do is with the childs' best interests in mind! We accomplish this by responding to the individual needs of each child; providing them with the unique handson, Montessori experiences, as well as home cooked, healthy meals by caring & loving staff who treat children as our own!
The Hills Montessori is also proud to have been voted Best Childcare in Omaha the past thirteen years in a row!
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Yes, we require all staff, including subs, part time and full time staff to be current on First Aid and CPR. We are so committed to safety and teacher training that we close twice a year to provide onsite staff training. We pay for the staff to attend training and pay for the training. Every two years all staff re-certify in CPR & First Aid. Our goal is to make it easy for all of our staff to keep current and acquire new skills and knowledge to be the best early childhood provides!
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Yes!
Not only does The Hills Montessori provide food, we have a commercial kitchen in which we cook our meals from scratch!
We meal-plan weekly, and post our menus on our website and Facebook page every Friday. We provide breakfast, lunch and two snacks per day, and are likely the best meals in town!
We source our ground beef from a local farmer and serve loads of fresh veggies and fruits. We eat our meals family style with the students where children have the opportunity to serve themselves and experience an unrushed, home-like experience.
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The Hills Montessori does not have indoor cameras. While we understand why some parents may feel a sense of security with cameras inside of cameras, The Hills Montessori has many policies and procedures in place that help ensure a level of safety that cameras can never provide.
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Montessori education is unlike any other educational philosophy offered and is not a "fad" approach to early childhood education but instead was founded in 1907 by Maria Montessori, who opened up her first school in Rome, Italy.
The key concepts of a Montessori approach to learning include what Maria Montessori coined as The Absorbent Mind, which is a young child's natural capacity to unconsciously absorb language and other fundamental learning experiences from their enviornment.
An additional key aspect that Montessori recognizes is that each child has "sensitive periods" for learning. This is described as having developmental windows where children easily acquire specific traits like movement, language and refined sensory perception.
Through recognititon of these unique developmental windows, children are better able to reach their fullest potential as the educational approach is independent to each individual child, instead of a "group" learning approach.
The Hills Montessori is locally and family owned, and not corporate. Our newest school, located in Elkhorn, is in a renovated home, where a family of six lived for years! It sits on nine acreas of land and feels more like a retreat than a childcare. The home was painstakenly renovated and took over seven years to open, as it was our goal to keep intact as much of the integrity of the building as possible. We love that the building was a home as our goal is to create warm, homelike environments, as opposed to sterile, cool and corporate spaces!