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Kenmont Montessori School in Brownsville celebrated United Nations Day on Thursday with a festival of world cultures honoring the school’s namesake, Maria Montessori, and her vision of world peace.
This year, Kenmont’s celebration coincided with the actual anniversary of the United Nations’ creation on Oct. 24, 1945 when a majority of signatories signed the UN Charter including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Kenmont, founded in 1972, celebrates the anniversary each year with a morning program honoring cultures around the world and a pot-luck dinner in the evening featuring each country’s cuisine in classrooms decorated to represent those countries.
This year’s theme was “Love and Kindness, that’s what we need to live in peace.”
Every year, students spend the first two months of the academic year studying a country in preparation for United Nations Day. Teachers decorate their classroom to reflect the country, and parents prepare costumes and cuisine to reflect the culture.
Countries represented this year included Holland, Cuba, Mongolia, India, the Czech Republic, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, England, the United States, Belgium and China.
“Maria Montessori believed that peace was the tool and children were the ones that would teach peace,” Kenmont Director Julie Gonzalez said.
Kenmont is a private school for 3- and 4-year-old pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The goal is that by the time students leave Kenmont, they will have been exposed to 12 different cultures and countries, Gonzalez said.
“The end goal is that they understand that even though we might have some differences, in the end we are all the same and we are citizens of planet earth. And so, the goal this year is that through kindness, if we have more kindness, if we teach our kids kindness, then they will be kind and the world will be a better place,” she said.
Each year Kenmont sends a delegation of seventh- and eighth-grade students to a youth conference in February at UN headquarters in New York City.
“They are studying different world issues. One is how to reduce military budgets. They will present and meet with kids from all over the world to try to find a solution,” Gonzalez said.
This year, Kenmont is representing Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa bordered by Somalia to the east, Eritrea to west and the Red Sea to the north, Ethiopia to the west and south, and the Gulf of Aden to the east.
With a population of 1.14 million, its official languages are French and Arabic.
Thursday morning, the older students began the program in the gymnasium by making a presentation for parents about the UN’s founding and its purpose. Then they assembled with flags of the various countries at the back of the gym.
Next, children in costume filed in, country by country, performed a dance and sat in front of the flags: Parrots from Brazil, Spaniards accompanied by Flamenco guitars.
A Chinese dragon snaked in, followed by 3- and 4-year olds from a dual-language class dressed as citizens of the Czech Republic. Next came Mongolia, Monaco and Mexic0.
Cowboys and cowgirls from a Texas rodeo represented the United States, followed by tiny costumed 3-year-olds representing India.
Kenmont Montessori, which has about 300 students, follows the Montessori method, designed more than 100 years ago by Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, educator and innovator, acclaimed for her educational method that builds on the way children learn naturally. She opened the first Montessori school, the Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House, in Rome on Jan. 6, 1907.
