Director’s Note

With this poem, I welcome you to Pebble Creek!

Each year we look back at our journey and feel overwhelmed … Not just for the distance we travelled but for the immense support we have had from everyone whom we met… Parents, teachers, children, family, friends, everyone showed so much faith in us all along, trusted us, allowed us to take all the risks and we took the risks because we were so sure of the support we had.

With a simple intention to offer meaningful education, a learning environment that encourages excellence, a safe environment where competition with fellow beings is not an option, a sense of love that helps us to be inclusive, and our continuous endeavor to be humane, we have had our share of successes and failures.

Our success lies in the way we have evolved and changed. We consciously, sometimes painfully but always willingly, moved from our current level to the next one.We have a long way to go as an organization and we realize this at the end of each day, each term and each academic year. We continuously strive to realign ourselves and approach our core vision with much more rigor, new enthusiasm and new research. Our reflections have yielded two things as our core focus areas:

– Individual Excellence

– Parent Education and Involvement

We realize that we need to rise up and help parents and teachers connect the dots and see value in an education that takes care of the life that is within each child. A life that opens up new possibilities for humanity which our children see at present and will be able to see when they grow up and take the role of an adult, a possibility that truly guides the child towards a life of fulfillment and reverence for humanity.

Pebble Creek has a unique ecosystem which can lose its balance by a good or a bad act of any one element. Most of the harmful or positive impacts on any ecosystem cannot be seen too early, most changes are noticed only after an ecosystem has been disturbed; it could be for its evolution or its destruction. To bring in the balance and to evolve, we need people who can adapt to our environment easily and quickly. We need people who want to explore new ideas of life and believe that if the individual is strong, the community will be strong. Today, we have a team that can help children build their perspective about the world around them. A team that comes with a firm understanding of what we do and wants to engage with meaningful education. We are very determined to push our boundaries and move towards excellence with this beautiful and passionate team.

Apart from creating a robust teacher team, we also realized and understood that if the home environment is disconnected from the school, the holistic development of the child is not possible. We believe that the home and the school must seamlessly merge for the child each day, as must the parent and the teacher. If the school and the parents wish the best for our children, then we must have a common plan. To support the parents in building their understanding of meaningful education, the school is committed to work on parent education through reading/learning circles and parent workshops organized at school.

Being a Montessori school we are moving towards an education that most of the world dreams of. Montessori as an education system has left nothing unattended from academic excellence to life skills, order and beauty to independent work, freedom to discipline, free choice to self-restrain and practical life activities to grace and courtesy. All these are beautifully woven to create a canvas for each child, the canvas called ‘Life’. The children will create on this canvas the personality they are meant to be, not what the adults wish. As educators, we need to follow the children and the larger plan which nature has for each child.

Dr Maria Montessori has said, “There is a part of a child’s soul that has always been unknown but which must be known. With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold. This is what the adult must do who seeks the unknown factor that lies hidden in the depths of a child’s soul. This is a labor which all must share, without distinction of nation, race, or social standing since it means the bringing forth of an indispensable element for the moral progress of mankind.”

And this is the search that we need all of you to embark upon, the search which is beyond what we know till now, is beyond what we can perceive and is beyond what we can imagine. Let’s explore this beautiful world of unknown together. Our existence will be about excellence, excellence in each and everything which we take up.

Best Wishes to all of you for a great journey that helps you reach your potentials and evolve as human-beings.

Sincerely,
Moiza Rafath