Tas Montessori School is the only one of its kind in Wolfforth. It originally opened 12 years ago with four students, but now the school has more than 70 kids enrolled. It’s the passion that puts it all into perspective for owner, Tasleem Mirza, who has been in the teaching profession for over 30 years.
“More than my business, it’s my passion. I simply love kids and I love teaching,” she says. “I love it when I see them growing and when I see that little smile on their face and how they are progressing everyday. They’re so smart. When you give them a lesson and they get it I say, ‘oh my god, they can do so much!”
It’s her love for kids which drove her to open her own Montessori school when she moved to West Texas.
“I was looking for a job, but then I wanted to work in a Montessori school. I couldn’t find any so I said, ‘oh well, I need to get back into my teaching’ and decided to open up my own school,” Mirza says.
Tas Montessori School is focused on a personalized education teaching style. The main goal of Montessori is to provide a stimulating, child-oriented environment where children can explore, touch, and learn. Children take part in an organized and structured self-directed learning environment.
“The classrooms are divided into different stations and the children work according to their own pace. In one classroom you will find the kids starting at the age of three and then you will also find a child who is about five in that same classroom,” Mirza says. “We don’t have the child learn numbers from one to ten, and then wait until he’s four to go ahead and give him addition. No, if we see that the child is ready, and this child is capable of doing more advanced activities, then we go ahead and give them.”
Mirza is the only Montessori certified teacher at the school, but she has many other teachers helping her that are trained to use the Montessori materials.
“I started with Pre-K and with only four kids. Now I have about 71 kids, but at a given time, I can only have 51 kids in my school. Some kids are two days a week, some kids are three days, and some are all five days,” Mirza says.
The kids can start as young as 18 months, and go all the way up through third grade. Mirza says that at a very early age they start teaching the children how to take care of themselves. She claims every exercise is a learning experience.
“Kids are just like sponges. You just start pouring water, and they will start absorbing whatever you teach them. The children are working with math, language, science, geography, and history everyday,” Mirza says. “If you go ahead and ask my kids to name the planets, they’ll know what the planets are. If you ask them what the continents are, they will tell you exactly what the continents are.”
Mirza says she has more children that attend her school through kindergarten, but she does have some kids that stay through second and third grade. Rachel Burgos is one of those students that has been at Tas Montessori School since she was 2 years old.
“My favorite part of school is seeing my friends and learning new stuff,” Burgos says.
Mirza says Montessori school is very hands on and is based strictly on a students individual ability.
“Children are not memorizing anything, so even if they are doing a simple exercise for addition, we have the different materials for addition such as the number odds and strip boards. This helps to make everything very hands on when they are working. The students can actually see what addition is, what subtraction is, what multiplication is. Whatever they learn, they learn with the concept. That’s the best thing about Montessori.”
