Montessori Center School Now Offers Spanish Immersion Program

New Curriculum Fosters Global Awareness, Linguistic Adaptability, and Deep Cultural Appreciation

Credit: Teresa Pietsch | Credit: teresa pietsch

With outdoor learning opportunities, a strong commitment to nurturing the “whole child,” and a new one-of-a-kind Spanish Immersion Program, a Montessori Center School (MCS) education offers a multitude of benefits for any young student.

The Spanish Immersion Program, which launched this fall, has taken off with families who want their children to expand their global awareness, linguistic adaptability, and cultural appreciation in an environment that is designed for exploratory learning. Read on to learn more about what an MCS education entails and the unique benefits of their Spanish Immersion Program.

What does your business or organization offer to Santa Barbara parents?

With deeply experienced, expert Montessori teachers and a time-tested hands-on learning model, Montessori Center School offers a progressive, whole-child education for children 18 months through 6th grade. Families choose us year after year because of our teachers’ outstanding work in early childhood development and our dynamic and child-centered learning environments. Our community and educational philosophy center around our multiculturalism mission, and you’ll see this in our school’s traditions, curriculum, and shared culture.

Families value the myriad outdoor learning opportunities that await our children each day on our beautiful garden campus. Families continue on with us through the elementary years because of our rigorous and responsive curriculum that is interdisciplinary and hands-on. The elementary program offers children strong academic preparation and the development of key executive functioning skills — helping them get ready for middle and high school while they explore and create with a high degree of independence. At MCS, we like to say, “Honor the child.” A big part of what this means is that — as different education fads come and go — we remain steadfastly focused on nurturing a love for learning in every child.

Perhaps best of all are our amazing teachers and multi-age classrooms. Your child will remain in the same classroom for two to three years with their teacher. Over that time, the teacher will get to know your family, your child, and their unique strengths extremely well. The partnership that forms between each of our amazing teachers and the families in their classrooms over those two to three years is very special.

What are the costs associated with your services?

MCS is an independent school, and families pay tuition. We offer generous need-based financial aid to qualifying families, and we encourage families to apply for financial aid if they foresee tuition being a barrier to attendance.

What are the unique benefits of your services?

When we say “whole child education,” we really mean it: Our educational format is designed to support each child’s social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical development. The biggest difference you will notice between a Montessori classroom and the traditional school environment is how everything in our classrooms is intentionally structured to create opportunities for children to build strong executive functioning skills and independence.

MCS children exhibit high levels of kindness, creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking from a very young age. Everything in their school day supports this. Beyond the Montessori curriculum — which is a world of exploration, creativity, and discovery unto itself — our students take weekly classes in Art, Music, Spanish or Mandarin, Sports, Library, STEM Lab and Drama as part of our specialists enrichment program.

We are also fortunate to offer after care, after-school extracurricular classes, and summer and winter break camp sessions to make working parents’ lives easier while our students continue to grow and thrive year-round. Our Upper Elementary program (grades 4 through 6) features interscholastic sports teams, an annual overnight science trip (CIMI, NatureBridge Yosemite, AstroCamp), and an annual spring three-day backcountry backpacking trip.

Who is behind your organization, and what is their background and experience?

Founded in 1965, MCS is a nonprofit organization with an independent Board of Trustees. Reporting to the board, Head of School Vanessa Jackson leads the staffulty, is herself a parent of two children in the school, and an alumni who attended the school as a child from age 18 months through 6th grade. Each classroom in the school is guided by a Montessori trained and certificated teacher. Notably, 95 percent of parents report that they would recommend MCS to other families.

What sets the your Spanish Immersion Program apart from other schools in the area? What are some of the activities you include in the program to help students become fluent?

We launched our one-of-a-kind Spanish immersion program this past fall, and our founding group of children in the program are thriving! It’s truly remarkable how quickly young children absorb language, and the students in our Spanish immersion program have the incredible opportunity to gain literacy and fluency in not one, but two languages: English and Spanish. We’ve seen a ton of interest and are expanding the program to serve ages 3 through 7 this coming school year. We’ll then add a grade level each school year for the next five years until our program spans preschool through 6th grade (ages 3 through 12).

What’s unique about our program and distinguishes it from other bilingual programs locally is the Montessori component: Spanish immersion aligns with the Montessori multicultural approach by fostering global awareness, linguistic adaptability, and deep cultural appreciation through hands-on, child-led exploration in a diverse learning environment. The curriculum is very hands-on, and the Montessori classroom environment is rich with concrete learning materials and tools. This means that children can learn the language from the teachers, from one another and from the environment itself.

As is true for Montessori classrooms, the curriculum in our immersion environment is multidisciplinary — incorporating music, art, science, history, and cultural studies alongside language and math. Children sing, count, build, solve problems, create, and prove in Spanish and English. This deepens and accelerates language acquisition and comprehension. We teach the children in a way that helps them become self-directed, and this fosters a strong sense of confidence and self-efficacy in each child.

What specifically does the Spanish Immersion program entail?

Spanish immersion education enhances cognitive flexibility, cultural awareness, and bilingual proficiency, leading to improved problem-solving skills, academic achievement, and future career opportunities. Our program currently serves children under the age of seven in a 90/10 format. What this means is that 90 percent of what children are speaking, reading, writing and listening to in the classroom is Spanish, and the remaining 10 percent is English. As children progress and approach fourth grade, this will gradually shift to a 50/50 format — with children accessing the curriculum and learning in both languages for roughly the same amount of time each week. The program is designed to help them become bilingual and biliterate by 6th grade.

Is there a certain age when students need to enroll by or number of years they need to stay in the program?

Yes, there are two important commitments we’re asking families to make. First, be ready to start your child in the program by the time they are 5 — and ideally as early as 3 years old. This is the developmental phase when the child is primed for language absorption, and we want to capitalize on this for your child. Second, you should be planning to keep your child in the program with us through 6th grade. The research on immersion education reveals that children really need to stay in the program through 3rd grade. The cultural, linguistic, cognitive, and metacognitive benefits of bilingualism are amplified for children who remain in the immersion environment through the duration of their elementary school years.

What values guide your teaching in the Spanish Immersion program?

Dr. Maria Montessori said, “Follow the child,” which was her way of recognizing that when we tap into a child’s natural interests, appreciate the developmental stage they’re in, and take the time to learn their unique needs, we can really help the child reach their full potential. In Spanish immersion at MCS, “follow the child” means honoring each student’s natural curiosity and individual language acquisition and pace, allowing them to explore and absorb Spanish organically through meaningful, hands-on experiences. Teachers serve as guides, providing a rich bilingual environment where children engage with Spanish in ways that feel natural and engaging, fostering intrinsic motivation and confidence in communication.

How do you ensure that students are mastering the regular Montessori curriculum while learning Spanish?

The curriculum in our immersion program is still our Montessori curriculum. The materials, lessons, and scope of what the children are learning and discovering about the world and universe are the same — but in two languages rather than in one. One misconception about immersion education is that, because the children are learning Spanish, they’re going to fall behind and risk not gaining proficiency in subjects like math and English. The data and scholarly research on this reveal quite the opposite to be true: On average, children learning in immersion classrooms with two target languages demonstrate stronger academic outcomes in both English and math over time than do their monolingual peers. However, this is only true for children who stick with the program through 3rd grade and beyond, and this is a big part of why we emphasize that this is a journey and a commitment through the elementary years!

Why do you think it is important to offer this opportunity? The research is clear: Growing up bilingual enhances cognitive flexibility, problem-solving skills, and cultural awareness, while also improving future career opportunities and communication in a globalized world. Yet in most school systems nationally, second language classes are not offered until middle or high school. Immersion programs invert this model — recognizing and capitalizing on the fact that children stand the best chance of becoming truly multilingual when we start young, in the spongy stage, at ages 3 to 6 years.

Is the program very selective? What goes into the application process?

Whether your child speaks exclusively Spanish at home, exclusively English at home, or a combination of both languages, our immersion program could be a great match for them and for your family. Interested families can and should reach out to our admissions office, and we’ll set up a time for you to come tour the school. We do currently have a waitlist for some grades but are currently enrolling students in kindergarten and first and second grade for the program. You can learn about how to apply for admission to MCS at: mcssb.org/applying-to-mcs.

More information:

Montessori Center School
401 N. Fairview Ave., Ste. #1, Goleta, CA 93117
(805) 683-9383
http://www.mcssb.org

This content was supplied and paid for by Montessori Center School.