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I thought I'd offer an update for anyone looking for related info in the future. Here are too many words:

My kid turns out to be someone for whom socialization is a priority. Her social world shrank in the multi-age classroom because she perceived the older returning students to already have friends and thus to be unavailable to her. She mostly picked unchallenging work so that she could do it with the couple of other new three-year-old girls in the class. Sometimes this meant not even working in the Montessori sense but more like putting a work on the table in front of herself and then playing around with a friend for awhile until the teachers redirected them.

She looked at which kids in the class had been given lessons on the reading shelf and inferred that reading was for older kids and decided she'd ask for a reading lesson in a couple of years. At one point the teachers gave her a work on paper that had simple printed instructions. They presented it without comment because I'd told them she was reading but she hadn't yet read anything in front of them. She followed the directions and the teachers were startled. They said they had seen no other evidence she was reading. Later they gave her the same paper work again and she ignored the instructions about which colors to use in which places and instead created a repeating pattern of color. She brought it home and showed me. I asked her to tell me about how she decided to color it. She said she'd followed the words already when she did it before and wanted to do it differently this time because she liked the way this looked.

I wasn't necessarily concerned that she advance in reading in school, but I was sad that the room had so many language materials available that looked like they'd be interesting to her based on what she likes to do at home and she was kind of ignoring them or not progressing through whatever lessons were available. She also seemed stuck at a particular point in the math progression even though she was coming home from school accurately describing place value to me in a manner I know I never taught her and must have been acquired from watching the older kids work on materials she wasn't yet able to use.

The teachers were warm and communicative and calming and great at identifying the social-emotional areas where she seemed to need to work. It just seemed a little bit like she was trying to bootstrap open-ended buddy play and silliness into an environment organized differently. She told me that she liked receiving lessons from the teachers but didn't like doing the work afterwards. From what I could figure out the lesson presentation was social interaction and then practicing the work felt isolated. When I observed the class I saw another new student who was responding very differently, diligently practicing with the materials until presented with new lessons, moving through work and work sequentially with great joy. At some point she and my daughter were both given lessons that allowed them to do a spelling work. I saw the other student repeatedly get the work out, follow all the steps, and put it away. My daughter used it once and spelled the words then apparently repeatedly declined to do it again when it was suggested to her. While I was observing I saw them suggest it to her. She took it to a table and kind of half-heartedly pretended to be looking at it when teachers came by but was really focused on trying to get out a stool and move it to someone else's table and kept having to be redirected.

I don't necessarily assume this is how my daughter would function in a Montessori environment at an older age, though if she did it would clearly be a mismatch when academics start to matter. We thought about trying to take her back to her prior preschool where she was incredibly happy, or re-apply to the gifted school with the thought that it might be a long-term solution for a kid who seems to want to blend with whatever she sees her age-mates doing if that maximizes her opportunity to play with them. In the end we decided to keep her at the Montessori school rather than transition her again. The teachers really were wonderful.

Then COVID arrived. Plans changed. So far this year she is at home with me while I work from home. We do schoolish things at her level for about an hour a day and she has free time most of the day. I try to turn math into games as much as possible but we are also progressing through parts of the Montessori math curriculum. Lately I've been turning handwriting practice/spelling into kind of a mad-lib game where I dictate parts of the sentence and then ask her to make something up. She's suddenly much more interested in writing, it was partly a matter of tweaking how we do it until I found something she actually wanted to do. I subscribed to Generation Genius for science videos and Preschool Prodigies for music. We've deep-dived on the medieval time period and dinosaurs because she was interested in those things. I think this will work for now.

We've added distance learning pre-k through our neighborhood school. My work day would be easier if we could pick and choose which school assignments to do and if they didn't have deadlines. But some of what they're asking her to do is rewarding or interesting or simply something I wouldn't have come up with for her to do. She also greatly looks forward to her small group zoom sessions because she craves the social interaction. This will work for now. We'll just have to figure out how best to keep meeting her needs as she gets older.