Saint Mary Academy welcomes the youngest members of the family and provides a beautiful, constructive space for babies and toddlers to rest and explore without overstimulation. We utilize Montessori-inspired methods of education in the Nursery at a developmentally appropriate age. We also have a plan in place for nursing mothers.

Our Early Childhood Education program is based on the Montessori method of education, which entails self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play. In our Montessori inspired classroom, children make creative choices in their learning while the environment and teacher offer age-appropriate activities to guide the process. It is foundational for being rooted in realism.

Catechesis of the Good Shepherd uses a Montessori approach to engage children in hands-on learning based on Sacred Scripture and Liturgy. It is designed to nurture a child’s pre-existing relationship with God. The children learn in a specially prepared environment called the Atrium, a sacred and special space where children engage in a process of reflection and interaction. This time spent in the Atrium allows for even the youngest child to build a lifelong relationship with Christ and His Church.

Saint Mary Academy strives to make available to families a rigorous Catholic Classical education grounded in the Liberal Arts (Trivium and Quadrivium) and the Great Books of the Western Canon, seeking to form students who love the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

To this end, the core curriculum of Saint Mary Academy integrates the history of the Hebrew People, Classical Antiquity, and Christendom with Religion, Art, and Literature.  

As John Senior noted, the wisdom of the Great Books "only properly grows in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, adventures, which have developed into the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest.” Accordingly, classroom instruction at the elementary stage aims to inspire the poetic imagination by deep engagement with classic works of art and literature, while guiding students through the necessary growth in reading, writing, and elementary mathematics to begin the study of the Trivium and Quadrivium. 

Proceeding into the Liberal Arts properly speaking, some short definitions of the Trivium and Quadrivium are in order:

Trivium

Grammar - the art of the structure of language and the relationship of symbol to reality. Students at Saint Mary Academy learn the 
Logic - the art of rational thought - the weighing of of symbolically expressed realities to arrive at true propositions about those realities. 
Rhetoric - the art of communicating thought with clarity, force, and beauty.

“Grammar is concerned with the thing as-it-is-symbolized. Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known. Rhetoric is concerned with the thing as-it-is-communicated.” (Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium)

Quadrivium

Arithmetic - relations of pure numbers

Geometry - relations of space and number

Music - application of number in time

Astronomy - application of space and number in time

The Quadrivium taken as a whole – God created the world according to geometric and harmonic principles. Our aim in studying these principles is to seek God through the order of creation and rejoice in it. 

The Great Books

A fundamental feature of classical education is immersion in the Great Books, the "best that has been thought and said."   Students at Saint Mary Academy read Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Plutarch, Virgil, St. Augustine, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, St. John Henry Newman, and much more

Latin

From the middle ages well into early modernity, education required mastery of Latin in addition to the student’s native language. We continue this tradition because Latin literature spans the movement from Classical Antiquity to Christendom. We can see the elevation of nature by grace and of reason by revelation when we read Cicero and St. Augustine, for instance. As Pope St. John XXIII wrote in Veterum Sapientia, “The wisdom of the ancient world, enshrined in Greek and Roman literature, and the truly memorable teaching of ancient peoples, served, surely, to herald the dawn of the Gospel which God’s Son, ‘the judge and teacher of grace and truth, the light and guide of the human race,’ proclaimed on earth."

The Practical Arts

To prepare to live out Saint Benedict's injunction to "work and pray," Saint Mary Academy students learn the technical arts as well - how to apply their hands as well as their minds to crafts both beautiful and useful.