The Finding Place started with a simple belief: childhood deserves room to breathe.
Michele Bares started The Finding Place with her husband, Matt Bares, because she wanted her own grandchildren to have the kind of childhood her children had: fun, peaceful, child-led, and genuinely magical. She homeschooled all of her own kids, and she wanted to open that same magic up to other families, too.
Not a bigger program with more enrollment and more noise, but a smaller one. A place where a child can spend twenty uninterrupted minutes watching a ladybug. A place where a guide knows not just every child's name, but their stories, their ideas, and their questions.
We draw deeply from the Reggio Emilia approach, the belief that every child is capable and curious, that learning should follow the child's own questions, and that children express their understanding in a hundred different languages: building, painting, storytelling, pretending. We pair it with nature-based education, where the East Texas outdoors is a daily classroom.
What ties it together is simple: we follow the child.
We are a Christian school, and our faith is woven gently into our days. We pray together, we begin our mornings with worship, and we share the love of Jesus in ways that are warm and age-appropriate. Families of all backgrounds are welcome here.
Michele, known as Mimzy to the children, has led The Finding Place for eight years. She holds a degree from Lamar University and has spent thirty-five years homeschooling her own children and other families' children. She is also a third-degree black belt in Taekwondo and has taught children martial arts for more than twenty years.
She sees her role a little differently than most. She is not there to run the children through a plan. She is there to watch, to listen, and to add what each child needs, when they need it.
[MATT: his background, work, and role at the school]
[MATT: what he loves about the children and families, in a sentence or two]