« After twelve years of experience as the associate manager of a private crèche, I decided to create my own early childhood facility. My objective was to offer the children a facility that was open, warm and welcoming, with differentiated learning catering to each individual’s pace and personality.
After having discovered the Montessori educational method, I was immediately convinced by it and decided to make it the core of this project. So in 2004, I founded the Am Piesch crèche, the first Montessori learning crèche where French was spoken in Luxembourg. My husband and my son soon joined the management to handle the financial and administrative side of things. Today, our enterprise has developed and has several crèches within the borders of Luxembourg. With the support of both my family and a good many reliable, devoted employees, I supervise all of our facilities whilst also making sure that the child remains the central focus of our attention, as recommended by Maria Montessori.
As for the future, it is structured around a timeless objective that motivates our everyday activities: To offer the best in terms of quality of life and education and learning to the greatest possible number of children, in a kind setting that is respectful of individuality. »
Dominique Godard – Manager & Founder
A child’s autonomy, everyday happiness, personal development and freedom are things that are important to us. We believe that each child has all the potential within them required for their development and that adults are there to enable this potential to blossom. It is essential to offer the child the opportunity to develop their various sensibilities within a framework suited to their psychological and physical needs, whilst at the same time working at their own pace and in accordance with their particular individual characteristics, whilst awakening them to the possibilities of social life.
The child must build its own personality and develop motor skills and intellectual faculties. This is why the teacher must have full trust in the child’s strengths, respect the child’s freedom of action, and prepare the required ambiance favourable for the child’s development. The teacher must be capable of observing each child’s different paces and know each child whilst showing both attentiveness and respect.
Freedom is not a pretext either for a hands-off approach or for letting things go. Corollaries of this are the concepts of independence, responsibility, determination and self-discipline. The child will have to learn not to impinge on others’ freedoms, thereby discovering the limits that his or her social environment imposes on him or her.
We respect the child in terms of his or her development and we never place him or her in a situation involving failure where he or she loses self-confidence. We also raise children’s awareness about the importance of taking care of themselves. Thus, through self-respect it is possible to respect others. One of our goals is to ensure that they are ready to accept society’s rules. To do this, we therefore take care generally to ensure respect for living beings, property, and the ambiance.
MARIA MONTESSORI
Thanks to the Montessori education applied in our crèches, the child develops at his or her own pace, in accordance with the precepts discovered by Maria Montessori, an Italian doctor and educationalist who lived in the early 20th century. She designed an open, experimental form of education, based on observation.
With a conception of the child as a fully-fledged person constituting the future of society, she developed concepts such as the absorbing mind, sensitive periods, and the polarity of discipline and freedom. The child is free to choose his or her work, how long is spent on it, and how frequently it is done, but must be capable of inserting himself or herself into the crèche’s microcosm
Likewise, the child does not need an adult to correct his or her work: the teacher therefore plays an unobtrusive observer’s role. The child learns alone in response to his or her natural curiosity during sensitive periods, development phases during which the child is particularly receptive to a given field and learns easily.
Maria Montessori also developed the idea of mixing age groups within the same group. This is why, at our crèches, in the Children’s Communities, children from 18 months to 4 years of age rub shoulders every day. The youngest ones thereby learn through contact with their elders, who feel they have a mission to pass on things, and a certain level of responsibility.
Autonomy and socialisation are the two main goals of Montessori education, constituting cardinal points which our crèches never cease to emphasise. Consequently, it is important for us for the child to be integrated into the world he or she lives in and to find their place there.
