About the school
Family-run in downtown Toronto since 1995
Three decades in the same neighbourhood, run by the same family, and still small enough that the people who own the school are the people who answer the phone. Very few Toronto schools of any kind can say that.
Where the name came from
A discovery about newborns, and classical music
The school takes its name from something the founding family noticed at home, long before there was a school. Playing classical music to their own newborn children, they saw them respond to pieces the babies had already heard while in the womb — recognising something they could not possibly have been taught.
They were not the first to notice it, and they would be the first to say so. But it felt like a discovery, and it pointed at the thing Maria Montessori had built an entire method around: that a young child is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled, but an active builder of their own mind, already at work.
Montessori training followed. The school opened in 1995 on Richmond Street West, and a second, smaller preschool site opened on Bathurst Street in 2005 and was licensed ever after — same family, same programme, ten minutes apart. We have now moved out of both, and are consolidating into one new downtown home for the 2026-27 school year.
What we are trying to do
Our mission is to develop young children with active and creative minds, a sense of understanding and compassion for others, and the courage to act on their beliefs. We stress the total development of each child — moral, intellectual, social, emotional and physical — through hands-on experience, exploration and discovery.
The foundation for the development of the personality is created during the first years of life. This is the perfect time to offer children a prepared environment where they can reach their maximum potential. From the school’s Parents Handbook
Everything else on this site — the three-year cycle, the long uninterrupted work period, the mixed-age classrooms, the insistence that every teacher be Montessori-trained — follows from that.
What we believe
Three commitments we do not trade away
Freedom, respect and faith in the child
This is the sentence the school was built on. It means we assume a two-year-old is capable until shown otherwise, we let children choose their own work, and we do not interrupt a child who is concentrating.
The whole child, not just the academic one
We are after moral, social, emotional and physical development alongside the intellectual — children with active minds, real compassion for other people, and the nerve to act on what they believe.
Hands before heads
Nothing is introduced abstractly if it can be introduced with a material first. Children hold a thousand-bead cube before they meet the numeral, and trace a letter with two fingers before they write it.
Family-owned
You will deal with the people who own the school
Discovering Minds is not part of a chain and does not answer to a management company. It is a private enterprise registered with Corporations Canada, run by the family whose name is on the licence.
In practice that means the person who shows you around is the person who decides things. If something needs sorting out, there is no regional office. It also means the answer to “will this school still be here in five years” is a good deal more reassuring than it is elsewhere.
Be first through the door
We are moving to one new downtown location for the 2026-27 school year. Call us or send a note now and you will be among the first families offered a tour when the doors open.