Gotta agree with everything every one has posted so far...DS6 attended a Montessori preschool from age 2-5. As he got into the 3-5 yr old mixed classroom our problems started to go through the roof...he moved through the curriculum like lightning and was bored out of his mind...his teacher wouldn't let him advance until he showed each and every individual/single step in the activity- Montessori can be very rigid in this fact. A lot of gifted children aren't able to break down how they got to a certain answer - it just comes to them so it was difficult to explain how he broke down the steps. He has dyspraxia and it was difficult when he was younger to carry the required Montessori trays that they carry their work on down onto their work rugs. He would drop them or drop things off the tray and the teacher would focus on that and not the activity - he wasn't allowed to move on until he showed her that he could carry the items to the work area which was insane to me. She kept holding activities back from him so that she wouldn't run out of curriculum for him to do and he was bored, bored, bored which lead to a ton of issues. The thing that alarmed us the most at his Montessori school was just as the last poster stated...when they saw a child who was "uneven" they did everything in their power to "balance" them out. The old square peg and trying to shove them into a round hole...."ain't going to work" in my eyes! My son would get in trouble because with their earlier activities they included such things as taking 2 dishes with a spoon or scoop and some kind of colored sand/rice/material and the child was expected to spoon the item from one dish to another dish without dropping the material all over the place. My son instead made up games when he was doing his scooping such as pretending to make "special recipes" with giving different amount of scoops for different materials and his teacher would get upset at him and tell him to just spoon the material over to the other bowl. Another time he was completing a map assignment and they are required to color in different map pictures specific colors that match the Montessori puzzles of that continent. He got in trouble because he colored the "wrong" colors on some of the countries...when the teacher asked him why he did those particular colors he honestly had good answers as to why but in her mind the work was wrong because it didn't match the puzzle.
I did a lot of researching on Montessori and if you find a true Montessori program that is flexible then it could be an amazing fit...unfortunately we looked at the 2 Montessori elementary school choices around us and neither are what I would consider true Montessori. I can understand why they want him in the younger class to learn the "basics" for a short period of time...Montessori is all about steps and moving up through steps...if he was to go into a Montessori elementary program not ever having been in a Montessori prek/K program then he will not understand how to handle a lot of the materials the correct way. Some Montessori elementary programs won't take a child unless they have had some prek/K/preschool experience with Montessori since it can be so different from what a child is used to doing.
Last edited by Belle; 10/17/09 05:29 PM.
