Katelyn'sMom - you are correct, a true Montessori program does not group by ages - that was one of the major belief's of Maria Montessori - she wanted children working together in various age levels so that they could all learn from each other.
My son attended a Montessori preschool program for many years and I did quite a load of research on Montessori over that time when I was teaching in regular public school. I love the whole Montessori approach and if done with some flexibility it could be a good fit for some children.
Most Montessori schools are very strict in the way they require a child to learn/complete activities. Lessons are taught in specific steps in a complete order and a child has to show mastery of all the steps before they are allowed to go onto a new activity. If they mastered the overall skill but did not complete the various steps, then many will not allow a child to move on. It is a lot of repetition - which was not a good match for my DS. When he learned the main skill, he was ready to move onto the next skill and he got tired of being told no or held back because he didn't string a math bead set neatly, didn't show his full work or didn't carry the tray steady enough. Once my DS got the main meat of a lesson/project he was ready to move on and did not want to go back and repeat the activity over and over again.
A Montessori classroom is set up in that a child is introduced to a lesson with the correct manipulatives and is walked through the various steps..then after their lesson they are allowed to use that manipulative/activity piece off the shelf during learning time. In my son's case, when they finally realized that making him do every single step when he has the lesson already mastered was just silly- he went through all of the preschool lessons in the blink of an eye and the teacher ran out of materials...which left him going back to repeat the same things over and he got bored out of his mind....he thrives on new activities/lessons/games....I know that there have been many discussions on Montessori so if you do a search you will find them :-)
One big issue we had with DS was that he is super, super creative and the teacher would get very upset if she saw him doing something different with a lesson/activity than what was supposed to be done with it. He would take many of the math manipulatives and come up with his own math games since he had already mastered the lesson, he wanted to make his own games...so he got in trouble a lot for that. We saw a lot of concern from the teachers/staff that he was so advanced and even had his teacher tell us to stop allowing him to read advanced books because he would get too far ahead of the rest of his classmates. They seemed very gung ho on trying to dumb him down so that he would fit better with the other children
Last edited by Belle; 06/21/10 09:44 PM.
