Your VOICES.

The Abba’s Orchard School is not so much of the typical school where the students learn with just books. The students here also learn with the aid of materials that help them actually experience what they are learning, even if it is just counting numbers.

Being a high school student in a Montessori school is pretty sweet. We get to do cool things that not a lot of teens out there do every day in their schools. We have awesome and totally not scary teachers who are fun, and we get to go to different places for field trips to explore other cultures. Like last 2008, we had an amazing time in Beijing and we got to see the Great Wall of China and some other great historical sites.

It’s pretty much a home away from home at the Abba’s Orchard School, where

all of us work together as one big community doing simple chores like cooking food, raising animals and growing crops. These are just some of the stuff we normally do that make us feel important and useful as adolescents.

We also have simple “household” chores like the occasional tidying up of the classrooms, preparing meals for everybody, not forgetting to feed the farm animals, watering the crops, buying the groceries, washing the dishes, and other similar chores. Sounds like a lot, huh? We’ve got our schoolwork, too. So we’re really booked up, but we still find time for the extra-curricular activities in school like scuba diving, soccer, painting, photography and such. It’s really fun!

One of the many different things done in the school is farming and it is a mandatory activity at the Abba’s Orchard school; that is why we are called the Erdkinder, which means “earth children.” We make sure not to harm the environment with pesticides and other harmful chemicals. After all, we only have one Earth and so far, it doesn’t look good anymore with global warming and all the scary things popping out in the news these days.

Established in 1998 in Bukidnon, Abba’s Orchard follows the principles and ideals of Dr. Maria Montessori. It now has six campuses in the Philippines, including the Mckinley Hill campus that started operating last November 2009. Our school is the only educational institution in the Asia-Pacific region that is trained and equipped to follow and apply the Montessori curriculum.

-by Sherlaine Yap

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