Our Campus
The Campus
Hilltop's student-centered, place-based Montessori curriculum is a perfect match for the intrinsic educational potential of our campus. Hilltop students and programs will serve both as caring stewards of the land and insatiable explorers of its boundless opportunity. The campus, with its 43 acres of fields, woodland, trails, and pond, and 20,000 sf of new and renovated classroom and administrative facilities, provides the ultimate prepared environment in which students at all stages of development can actively strive toward responsible independence and the fullness of their potential.
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Children's House
The three to six year olds' environment, first and foremost, is a children's house: a calming and respectful space that belongs to the children in scale, proportion, flow, comfort, safety, and inspiration. It is a hands-on, interactive, sensorial environment that calls to them. It is a place of grace and beauty. It is in the children's house that the seeds of literacy, numeracy, care of self, others and the environment are sown. Both the practical and wondrous are offered in response to the child's innate striving toward independence, toward the desire and ability to "do it for myself".
Elementary House
These six to nine and nine to twelve year old Elementary classrooms are defined by non-interference in the learning process. They are conceived as continuums and designed to accommodate the full range of potential and wonder of each child throughout this expansive stage of development. The classrooms provide students prepared and inspiring access to the necessary tools, materials, adults, technology, the outdoors, and one another so as to meet their imagination and intellectual thirsts head-on. These hands-on spaces thrive on attention to order and care; and most importantly, they are where students come to construct their own learning and, in turn, themselves.
Middle School House
The Middle School environment is part transition zone, part staging area, part performance, part R & D space, and part launching pad. It is the place where the key materials of one's childhood classrooms are traded for the tools of society: where the manipulative is exchanged for the calculator; the notebook for the computer, the concrete for the abstract. The Middle School environment serves the reflective, introspective, and intellectual needs of the adolescent. It is all about flexibility and technology, large scale projects and intimate dialogue, and is designed to meet the changing and diverse interests, passions, and needs of the adolescent.