PARTNERSHIPS

​

Downtown Montessori Academy offers its students a variety of school-day enrichment opportunities:

Urban Ecology Center

Downtown Montessori Academy is proud to be one of the UEC’s Neighborhood Environmental Education Program (NEEP) schools. All DMA students age 5 and older visit the Center least 6 times per year for science and environmental education, both within the center and the surrounding Riverside Park.

​

Art Museum's Junior Docent Program

Students visit the Museum for themed tours over the course of three years, building on concepts and skills around art while engaging with the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Collection.

JDSP is designed to teach elementary school students vocabulary, history, and interpretation strategies in visual arts. The instruction provided assists students in developing awareness and understanding of the visual arts in relation to history and cultures. Additionally, students explore and develop various verbal, visual, and critical-thinking skills that can be applied to discussing works of art. They also develop a sense of ownership and belonging to a vital cultural institution in their community and encourages their continued attendance to museums in the future.

In Year 3 of the program students will:

• Select a favorite work of art from the Museum’s collection for further investigation

• Create a reproduction and a creative response to the selected artwork

• Research and develop a 3-5 minute presentation of the selected work of art

• Deliver the presentation, artistic reproduction, and creative response to a group of peers, family, and Museum staff as Junior Docents during the graduation tour.

​

Starbase

STARBASE Wisconsin is an interactive academic program that helps youth increase their knowledge in STEM. Fifth grade students are taken on a five-week odyssey into the exciting world of the sciences though hands-on activities and experiments, technology projects, and interaction with professionals in STEM fields.

What students do:

• Experiment with indoor and outdoor rockets to learn Newton’s laws of motion.

• Learn navigation and mapping.

• Explore solid modeling using Pro/Engineer software.

• Design and create solid objects using the 3-D printer.

• Conduct investigations of rovers to identify the function and practical use of different sensors.

• Use temperature probes and computer technology to test how heat is conducted through various materials.

• Build molecular models and investigate properties of fluids.

What students learn:

• Math: units of measurement, estimating, plotting, coordinate graphing, interpreting graphs and predicting.

• Science: Newton’s Laws of Motion, properties of air, speed, energy transfer and pressure.

• Engineering: Apply science and math content to engineering challenges, develop criteria, test and evaluate designs. Students will learn the entire engineering design process.

• Science and Inquiry: ask a question, make a hypothesis, do an experiment, make an observation, collect data, analyze your data, change a variable, and make a conclusion

• Ask questions, solve problems, and work in teams.

• How to communicate what they learn; how to take their learning to the next level.

​