Best Parenting Hack of 2023: Instead of School Vacation, Try School *on* Vacation. Everybody Wins 

MY TWO BROTHERS AND I all went to Montessori school. We started in nursery school, and I can still remember my first classroom vividly. Open-plan with movable walls and lots of natural light shining on the various learning stations scattered around the room. Towers of pink blocks in decreasing sizes tapering up to the top, or round pegs in increasingly wide widths or high heights, to teach proportionality. Long sticks of different lengths in candy striped red and blue to teach counting. Shapes for tracing. Sandpaper letters for learning the alphabet by sight and feel. Practical everyday items like locks and keys. Puzzles and flags and maps. 

We would spend the day moving from station to station at our leisure, doing what activities struck our interest, working together only if we first politely asked the other child—in addition to nurturing independent thinking and working, and stimulating a desire for exploration, a huge tenet of Montessori is politeness and empathy. At circle time, Miss Mitchell would gather us all to sit cross-legged together, sing songs and have hands-on lessons about the theme of the week. For Thanksgiving, for example, we filled baby food jars with buttermilk and shook them until our little arms were about to fall off to simulate how the pilgrims churned butter. 

I attended Montessori only through second grade, but you can see my memories have held strong. So, when I heard that AYANA Estate in Bali was launching a Montessori program for kids aged 2½ through 6, I knew I had to get one of my nieces there. 

A legacy luxury hotel in southwest Bali, AYANA is probably best known for its Rock Bar, with its blazing sunset views over Jimbaran Bay, from which you have a clear view of the planes coming in for a landing at Denpasar airport. An engineering feat of mind over nature, the resto-club is built into the cliffs, is accessible only by one of two fun-tastic funiculars, and, despite the fact that it keeps expanding, remains one of the harder reservations to get in Bali. 

But AYANA is literally an estate, growing into a full-fledged town more and more each year. Their large spa enclave was voted best in Indonesia in our Travel+Leisure Luxury Awards, they care for monkeys and horses, in recent years they’ve added a beach, beach club, and a fourth hotel (AYANA Segara). And they’ve just debuted both an organic, permaculture farm full of indigenous breeds of crops planted in a golden spiral, and SAKA Museum, a first-of-its-kind in Bali celebrating Indonesian culture and history. 

Most interestingly, they’ve taken the luxury hotel notion of “kids club” and just blown everyone else’s version out of the water. In 2023, AYANA launched a partnership with the famed Green School to create Green Camp, for 7- to 12-year-olds to learn about the world through the lens of nature conservation and food cultivation at an in-house farm and in their mangrove sanctuary. And AYANA has also opened an outpost of the world’s largest network of Montessori schools, Guidepost. 

The older kids can enroll in Green Camp for one, three or four days. The Montessori programming is available to the younger kids by the week or the month, which makes it appealing to parents who want a solid base of routine in their vacation and to the increasing number of digital-nomad families out there—”addressing parents’ hopes for a nurturing holiday for their children,” says general manager Giordano Faggioli—and even to residents of Bali with preschoolers. 

So, I went down to AYANA with my brother, Jaysen, sister-in-law, Shirley, and their daughter, Umbria, then aged 4¾, to check out Guidepost and to see what it would be like to mix a tropical holiday with Montessori school. 

In the mornings, after breakfast we’d do a family activity: tour the farm (T+L tip: break off an ear of their corn and eat it raw—it tastes like it’s already been cooked and coated in sweet butter), run in the waves, tackle one of the various waterslides scattered around the resort. After lunch, one of us would take Umbria on the trolley to camp. She’d shed her shoes in a cubby and disappear into the classroom. Some days the teachers took the kiddos on expeditions around the grounds of the estate—one evening as we were walking through the gardens, Umbria showed me an edible flower and pointed out where the bees go in, as she had learned earlier—and on the camp’s closing day, all the families gathered for a singing circle and a scavenger hunt on the beach. But during most of the trip, the schedule left us grown-ups free in the afternoons for spa appointments, a jamu-making class, some breezy kid-free downtime with margaritas, or, that most adult of activities, work. 

Then one of us would pick Umbria up, maybe squeeze in a little more pool time, pop to our rooms for showers then off for sundowners (proud to have taught her that word this trip) basically anywhere on this westward facing property… though of course the ocean spray over the banquette nestled in the front of a deck at Rock Bar provided the most dramatic denouement. 

Here, Umbria made friends with the DJ, who let her borrow his headphones for a bit while he taught her about his mixer board. At Kampoeng Bali, the traditional dinner theater that drums up an action-packed evening of mythology, dance, giant puppets and fire shows, Umbria made friends with one of the musicians, who let her borrow his mallet to tap out a tune. When we had dinner at Kisik seafood restaurant, the musicians actually had an extra instrument at the ready just for eager kiddos, which Umbria of course was so she wound up joining the serenade to a couple having a romantic private meal down the pier.   

All of which is to say, the entire AYANA estate is not just kid-friendly but in many ways a giant Montessori classroom itself—a sprawling campus where everyone seems happy to answer an inquisitive four-year-old’s questions and help her learn about the world hands on. Even the Japanese toilets provided a teachable moment! And as much as I love my niece and planned this trip around her wellbeing, I was also grateful to get some adult time with my brother and sister-in-law while she was at school, which I’m sure is what Faggioli means when he says, “We truly hope the entire family will enjoy the holiday they’ve been longing for.” 

The Details

Guidepost at AYANA offers weekly and monthly Montessori school packages for children aged 2½ to 6. One-week Guidepost Adventure program: Tuesday through Friday, half-days including lunch IDR7,500,000++. One month (four consecutive weeks) Guidepost Children’s House program: Monday through Friday, half days IDR10,950,000++ or full days IDR13,350,000++. ayana.com/bali/guidepostayana; ayanabali@guidepost.id 

Green Camp AYANA relaunches in December 2023 for children aged 7 to 12, and are available for one-day experiences for parents and kids together (IDR1,870,000++ per day per guest), three-day programs for kids only (IDR5,615,000++ per day per child), and four-day programs with kids-only days plus one family day (IDR7,480,000++ per day per child). ayana.com/baligreencampayana

AYANA Segara is the newest hotel on the Estate. Resort View Rooms from USD486.59 net per night, including breakfast for two, and Ocean View Rooms from USD612.19 net per night, including breakfast for two. ayana.com/bali. 

Lede images by Shirley Wang.

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