Our Lower Elementary program has achieved some significant milestones this year. First, on Monday, June 1, Greene Towne celebrated its inaugural 3rd Grade Class of 2026 at a beautiful ceremony held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. These students and their families were foundational in forming our Lower Elementary program and their impact will be everlasting in our school’s history. And second, the Lower Elementary students spent the 2025-26 school year learning about civic responsibilities and collaboratively researching and creating a special awareness campaign about sanitation. You can learn more below.
We are so proud of our 3rd Grade Class of 2026 and are excited for what is to come for them in their educational journey!
Our 3rd graders sat down to chat with Lower Elementary Assistant Teacher Gabby Vittor to share their experiences at Greene Towne Montessori.
Need in Deed
Last summer, Teacher Shelby, Co-Lead Teacher of the Elm Tree community, attended Need in Deed training along with our Montessori Director, Emily Bittner, and Allison Wiedman, our DEIB Coordinator. Need in Deed is a framework that guides teachers in helping children carry out a civic action project. What makes it unique is that it was created by parents who wanted their children’s service learning to go beyond one-off projects. Through this model, children learn about themselves, their classmates, and how they can contribute to the greater community. Once a project is identified, they’re connected with community partners, which helps bring the experience to life.
Ms. Allison coordinated the year-long civic action focused Need in Deed project and worked directly with the Lower Elementary students over the 2025-26 school year. They’ve worked hard at observing the community around us, taking observational notes of potential issues, participating in lessons, and surveying our friends and neighbors, which led them to focus on the concerns surrounding sanitation in Philadelphia. It culminated into a final project: an informational poster detailing sanitation practices and the importance of recycling and composting in our community.
Selecting the Project
For their project, our Lower Elementary students chose to focus on the issue of sanitation, specifically trash collection and what can be done about the litter and waste in our neighborhoods around Philadelphia. The children were especially motivated by the results of the community surveys they created and conducted.
Why Sanitation?
During one of very first Need In Deed activities our third grade students went on a walk around the immediate area surrounding our school and took pictures of anything that interested them. Many of the photos they took focused on sanitation (or lack thereof) around the city. They city was also just coming off DC 33’s strike in the summer so trash collection had been a huge topic of conversation.
As the students went through the school year working on the programming, reading books and taking field trips around Philly, the issue of waste, who is responsible for collecting it all, and how we can work as a community to help address the issue really stuck out as most pressing to our students.
Lower Elementary read books focused on supporting community and being civic minded.
Montessori and Us
A huge tenant in Montessori education is beautifying the environment so that children can work and thrive in a classroom that is clean, free of any clutter, and emphasizes the inclusion of plants and natural materials. We have found that principle, along with community building, being at the core of our pedagogy has blended beautifully with the Need In Deed program and heavily inspired our students’ choice in focusing on cleaning up our city at large.
Community Partnerships
Community partner David Evans, co-founder of Block By Block Philly, a volunteer community-based, non-profit organization participating in making Philadelphia the cleanest city in America, spoke with the children. The children were inspired by the work of Block by Block and expressed interested in organizing a block cleanup for our community and learned more about how to move forward with that.
Former Greene Towne parent David Bloovman of Bennett Compost presented to the students about how composting is done in Philadelphia and gave the children more insight on what they might like to add to their awareness poster campaign.
Capstone Project: The entire class collaborated on awareness posters to kick off a campaign to beautify our wonderful city.
End of Year “Going Out” Locations
Lower Elementary wrapped up the school year continuing their weekly explorations around Philadelphia.
