Oh, and as for Montessori--really check out the program. Some are great, but we got into one that was very lock-step about requiring the completion of activity 1 before our son could go on to activity 2. (Even though before we enrolled him, I told them he was reading books and asked if he would have to complete all the pre-reading activities first...They just lied!) That meant that he was supposed to be doing letter ID activities that he could have done when he was not yet 2! His response: he just never did anything in the language arts section of the room. Not good.
My much-too-gentle advocacy for him was ineffective. It wasn't until our January conference--after a mid-term evaluation that TOTALLY missed the boat on DS6's abilities--when my DH and I together insisted upon changes that things finally changed. The teachers reluctantly let DS6 skip the "easy stuff," and he did a week's worth of (still too easy) LA activities in a day. They moved him on to reading fast after that, but I saw how bad it can be to have rigid rules in place about what activities kids must do.
A friend of mine had a similar sort of problem with her highly asynchronous kid at a different Montessori program, so I know that ours wasn't the only one like that. Just beware. Having a bunch of levels of materials in the room does a child no good if he isn't allowed to use any of it!
