From the classroom · August 2026
Painting side by side
Two children, one table, a row of paintings drying on the windowsill. What art at a Montessori school teaches about sharing materials and finishing work.
Two children are painting at a shared table, each on their own paper, close enough to see what the other is doing. Along the windowsill behind them a row of earlier paintings is drying in the afternoon light.
In a Montessori classroom there is usually one of each material, so sharing a paint set is not a lesson in sharing so much as a daily fact. Children learn to ask to join, to wait for a colour, and to invite someone in. A good idea, the room teaches, gets better when someone else adds to it.
Art here is one of the daily choices, alongside the garden, the classroom animals and music. The paintings on the windowsill are not for a display board. They are finished work, and finishing something you chose to start is its own lesson.
Published October 10, 2026. Photo taken august 2026.
What this shows
Learning
Art as a daily choice: imagination, self-expression and the care of materials, from the school's arts strand.
Character
Sharing one set of materials, waiting without being told to, and seeing a piece of work through to the end.
See it for yourself.
Visits run Tuesday to Friday while classes are in session and last about an hour.
More from the classroom
Story time in two languages
Maestra Nuñez reads to the class, and the room listens in English and Spanish. What a picture book teaches about language, patience and belonging.
Word cards on the reading rug
How reading starts at SWREA: a child, a rug and a set of word cards. Phonics from the first day, built with the hands before it is written on paper.
Isopods under the magnifying glass
Lab coats, goggles and a classroom habitat: how SWREA's youngest scientists start with observation, and why that is the heart of the Research Institute of Planet Earth.