Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 16/01) - Six-year-old Gaylen Pierce moves a group of blue, red, and yellow beads to form a triangle on a piece of orange felt laid out on the table. His fingers move with absolute seriousness, adjusting each bead to form perfect lines.

Eight-year-old Grade 3 student Christopher McIntosh ponders a math problem. - Jorge Barrera/NNSL photos

It's 10 a.m. at Montessori school. Inside it looks more like a basement playroom more than a school room with the usual rigid lines of desks and a wall consuming chalk-board.

Here children, some in some groups, some alone, sit around small tables or on the floor, absorbed in the act of playing.

"I'm not playing, I'm working," says Pierce sharply.

Which is true, Pierce is working on his math.

Two plus four equals? Pierce mulls it over.

"Twelve?"

Another boy, about the same age, ambles over and surveys the scene. He shakes his head no when he hears the answer and explains how the beads work.

"Two plus four equals six," says the boy moving the beads around to prove his point.

Pierce will probably never forget the answer again.

Montessori school sits in a renovated Hudson Bay staff house on 52nd St. The school's history stretches back to 1975, when a group of parents founded a pre-school classroom. In 1998 the school received private school status and now offers grades 1, 2 and 3.

Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian medical doctor and the philosophical author behind the school, believed in the physical act of learning. "Looking becomes reading, touching becomes writing," she wrote.

From her thoughts sprouted a school system that stretches all over North America and Europe.

Montessori schools blur the lines between work and play. Play in classroom, unlike play in a child's private time, is a means to an end. At the end of the exercise there is a lesson.

Foday Dumbuya is the principal and director of Montessori school in Yellowknife. He's taught at the Montessori School in Yellowknife since 1993.

"We believe all subject areas are interconnected," said Dumbuya

Dumbuya acts more like a guide than a teacher. Everyday he sits with each student and talks about their work. How far Dumbuya takes them depends on how much they know. Each child is taught at a different pace.

And the results are remarkable.

In one morning class, five-, six-, seven- and eight-year-old students figured out the Pathagrium theorem, changed uneven fractions into mixed ones and de-constructed sentence structure.

Dumbuya beams at his student's aptitude.

"I want them to see work not as a task but as an exploration," says Dumbuya.

Montessori school has 40 students and most seem to enjoy going there.

"I've learned about stuff that lived a long time ago," says eight-year-old Nigan Juniper.

"I like the easy work," says Tanya Paneak.

The school charges $5,000 in tuition per year.

Koinonia Christian school

Koinonia Christian school is just one classroom at Mildred Hall school.

About 10 children, ranging from kindergarten age to Grade 5, attend this small school to learn about math, social studies, English and God.

The school has been around since September 1996.

According to school's only teacher and principal, Judy Reath, the school was born from parents who wanted to put the Protestant God back into the curriculum.

"There is a group of parents who believe God's ideal is to educate students about Him," says Reath. "Public school boards don't focus that way.

"Here we relate things to what the Bible says," says Reath.

The school has jumped locations several times since its inception.

It began in a portable classroom beside Weledeh, then it moved to the Yellowknife Pentecostal Church in 1998 before going back to a portable outside of J.H. Sisson's school in 1999.

The school took a sabbatical last year and returned to the education scene again this year in a Mildred Hall classroom.

Reath says the school's board is looking for city land as location for a portable classroom, which will become the school's new permanent home.

The children seemed to enjoy their one room school. "I like the small classes because I know everyone," says nine-year-old Grade 5 student, Lydiah Rabesca.

The school charges $250 a month in tuition.