Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy montessori education and identifying gifted kids

One of the core tenets of the Montessori method is the mixed age classroom. There is no such thing as a "curriculum for 2 yo". The kids from about 2.5 up to K age should be in a classroom together, the younger kids learning from watching the older ones. If there is no age mixing, it has very little to do with Montessori, even if they do use the materials.
It is true that montessori does not usually bother with identifying giftedness, simply because the idea is that all kids are working at their own pace anyway, though they do tend to run into problems with the speed gifted kids work through concepts and appear to "skip" developmental stages, and if a kid is ready for the 6-9 age classroom stuff even though they're still four, there is not much they can do except lug around materials for a while and when that makes no sense any more, let the kid skip, just like regular schools.

Montessori is in many ways the most rigid and inflexible method around - the prepared environment, the one and only way to use materials, the sequence of works - for the method to work for gifted kids, you need the built In flexibility of the mixed age classroom and the individual pacing. The constraints of the age based classroom destroy most advantages the method might have had.

Leave her in as long as she has fun. If you realize she starts getting frustrated, it's probably time to look for alternatives.

Thank you so much for your insights.

What you said in the last paragraph, i think, is very true. They know she is bright. I do not think they know how bright.

For now, she seems very happy, so I am happy. They also told me today that they plan on moving her up to the 3s classroom, along with a few of her age-mates. So, perhaps my little phase of worrying was for naught.

It is a montessori daycare/school. I think the state legislates things like naptimes and interacting between age groups, so their hands are tied there if they want subsidies. So, I do think that the kids miss out on that tenet of Montessori education.

I think though, once she moves up to the 3s, there IS more intermingling.

That's where I am at for now. I wont worry until there is a problem. My curiosity was more... Am I snow-flaking her? Am I seeing something that they aren't? and if so, is it because I am her mom, or because they either aren't equipped to see it, arent being presented with all the information, or are trained not to investigate it and just go with the flow. Sounds like its a little bit of all three.

In DD's case, I think one big factor are also the kids that attend the school. Her school is careful to screen kids - the application process is long, including requiring the parents to sit and watch each primary classroom for 15 minutes - each classroom, despite being the same ages, are very different due to the personalities of the teachers who run the classrooms and the children in the room. So - that tends to filter out disengaged parents or parents who after observation find it is not what they are looking for...

So I suspect that the children that tends to come into her school are more motivated and tend to lean towards being bright as a group.

The other thing I noticed compared to the preschool she was in before (and that DS went to when he was 3), there is a much wider range of "non-academic" activities - those are not ones that people associate with finding GT like pouring water from one container to another, punching a shape with pins which were not present in DS's traditional room, which leaned more towards pretend play/academics.

From what I have seen, because they are so used to having different kids move at different speeds - with most common being that kids will move faster in some areas but not as fast in other areas - teachers are trained to really go with the flow rather than having the whole group doing the same tasks, which is more typical in a traditional room. When the whole group is suppose to be moving together at mostly the same pace, the outliers stand out. When a group disperses to work on their own activities at different levels as the norm, the outliers may not stand out as much, because no one is doing the same activity all together anyway. If a child wants to work on an activity for just 10 minutes, that is fine. If he is engaged for 20-30 minutes, that is usually fine too. They don't have to wait for everyone else if they want to do something else. So I suspect in this environment, teachers are not really pay attention to giftedness.

For 2 year olds, you are going to find that age constraint in many states - teacher/student ratio, naptimes, what the age differentials can be in a group of kids all are set by law that all daycares have to abide by for licensing from what I understood in our state.

Note, what you see at home will not be what teachers see in school. We always joke that we have home DS/DD and school DD/DS - they are always going to be different in different environments. The thing you want to keep an eye on is if she is suppressing who she really is to "fit in" (which we were starting to see in DS as young as 3). But if she is happy and engaged there, I would not worry...

She is a submissive and sensitive child by nature, and often defers her own desires to please others. I suspect she has some pretty pronounced gifts in intuition and empathy. This is wonderful, of course, but it does present challenges in knowing who "she is".

Several times, at her school I have witnessed this. One example. They children had taken books off the shelf and another tried to take the one my child had selected away from her. The teacher intervened gently, and walked away. My daughter waited until the teacher was focused on something else, slid the book over to the other child, and went up and got another book. She was about 19 months with this occurred.

We were watching ice age last night and the "squirrel" got hurt and she turned to me and said "poor squirrel. is ok mommy? ok?"


sooooo... that really presents a challenge to me as her mom... how do I know if she is even willing to articulate assertiveness? she does with me to an extent, but I doubt she does there. She seems happy to go, though.

Tigerle, I am curious to know your firsthand experience of Montessori? Our experience across four classrooms at two schools (and I have observed at several others) differs from yours.

Of course Montessori has curriculum, though it is matrixed and spiral rather than linear. Works are not just randomly placed in classrooms.

Typical Montessori age divisions are Toddler (18m - 3yo), Children's House (3 - 6yo), Lower Elementary (6 - 9yo / G1-3), and so on. Many states have rules that differ for children under 2.9 or 3. In our state 2.9 is the minimum age for pre-school and any child younger than that is governed by strict EEC daycare rules. Thus they are usually placed in separate classrooms from the 3 - 6 yos. There is also a developmental gulf between even the brightest 2.5 yo and 6 yos.

It’s not clear exactly what you mean by “identifying giftedness”. I would push back on this, and say that - certainly at younger ages - Montessori naturally accommodates at least moderate giftedness. Comparing notes with families whose children attend typical schools, their gifted children typically have far more frustrations in the classroom than children in the Montessori schools. Any school system, including those focused on the gifted, is challenged to accommodate a PG child - PG children don't come along that often. Our experience over three years in Montessori has already embraced the full range of acceleration: skipping topics already mastered; accelerated pace through materials, compaction as chosen by the child; enrichment in the classroom both by broadening/deepening and by bringing in more advanced works; subject acceleration. This has worked well, especially because of the spiral that is built into much of the mixed age curriculum: DS has been able to access similar topics at a much deeper level than age mates. This is unremarkable and completely accepted because there is a natural spread in depth and grasp of concepts between typical students of differing ages. In a year or so we may do a radical grade skip with the full support of our school. I cannot imagine any other school system that could have worked more constructively with our highly asynchronous DYS. … But I can imagine some teachers who would be less supportive.

A well-prepared environment is freeing for children - they are able to navigate and determine their own works, and set their own pace through the works. Materials tend to be self-correcting, and their use is only as rigid as the teacher who acts as guide. Some teachers do encourage extensions and combinations of materials, and children will invent their own. For example DS loves the dice roll game, which is primarily used for learning basic addition. He tries to roll prime numbers and observes their frequency.

My youngest child is in a classroom with a fairly tight age range from 2.2 - 3.2 (this is a new school: the toddler program is rolling up to a 3 - 6 program). They have a range of works in the classroom, which are updated weekly. Their teachers are very thoughtful about which works to put out, informed by the children’s exhibited interests and levels of mastery. While a program with a tight age range does have limitations - for the three year olds this is primarily to do with the lack of older exemplars - the works do not have to be tightly constrained, and children are not prevented from doing works that are either simpler or more challenging.

This is really to do with who your child is vs. the environment in which she is placed. We have one child who is very reflective of their environment, a second who is very assertive, and a third who is highly intuitive and empathetic. As a toddler the third child broke down in tears when watching the Ugly Duckling in Mandarin (which beyond numbers and colors they did not speak). Children like these do tend to go with the flow and avoid disruptions.

We taught our very gentle child first to protect themselves by asserting "stop" or "no" or more complex statements to defend themselves. Then we gradually taught them to proactively ask for what they want. Even now these requests are often very gentle, but they are usually persistent and end up getting what they want :-)

If it's reassuring, our quite assertive 2 yo is more academic at home than at school. At school she is drawn to practical life activities, art, listening to stories, singing, and group work such as doing large puzzles. There are more academic works available which she will choose but she is not deeply drawn to them. At home she likes the movable (magnetic) alphabet, demands to have words deciphered, likes premath games, etc. Her teachers recognize that she is capable so do make works available but follow her lead on whether she chooses to engage with them. This may be as formal as an official work, as simple as emphasizing the sounds in words when reading, or as spontaneous as counting popsicle sticks stuck into playdoh. Even though she is not as hellbent on consuming all information available and structuring the world as her older brother was, she is tracking pretty closely with his milestones at a similar age.

Two classrooms at two different schools, one we only shadowed at, one DS9 did a K program at for a year, with a view to enrolling him in first grade there. Each time, we decided against it. Each time, I was so disappointed with how perfect Montessori sounds on paper and how it then was implemented, there was always so much picking and choosing which distorted the whole result. So I started reading up on stuff. My take away (YMMV, must vary really, because you will always see a different implementation) is that you just can't separate the method from the implementation and insist it's still Montessori even though you dont do, for instance, mixed age classrooms. Of course there's always a reason, possibly a compelling one, for why they are doing some stuff and dropping other stuff, but there is also a reason why the method demanded stuff in the first place. So if administrative rules or financial constraints force you to offer age based classrooms, the question is just how much Montessori is left and whether it might not be more honest to call that school "Montessori inspired" or something.


Please note that I bracketed "curriculum for 2 yo" with quotation marks. I never said Montessori doesn't have one, it's just not supposed to be age or grade based the way it is in traditional schools, the fluidity and individual pace being of of the points of the mixed age classroom after all.

I don't want to quote your description of the Montessori environment that so far has worked well for your children, just because it would make my post so unwieldy. Suffice it to say it sounds great - Montessori done well, implemented thoughtfully and with some flexibility. However, I do think you are lucky, because it is easy to get Montessori very very wrong and it can work out just as badly for asynchronous kids as a traditional school might.
After all, the OP has asked what to be aware of as her very asynchronous child moves through the age levels, and the age based classrooms are already a red flag that the implementation of those parts of the Montessori method that offer benefits particularly for gifted kids in that particular school leaves a lot to be desired.

This. My son at 3 year old was not good at rolling and unrolling of little mat where you put the work on. I was told "he cannot proceed academically until he does it." He also had issues with most of the room was off limit to him because he hasn't been presented the lessons yet. We left after a month. NOT a good fit with that teacher/school.

Thomas,

do you think that problems with young kids in Montessori settings are often as easily recognized as your son's incompatibility?

That's sort of what I'd really like to figure out... are incompatibilities always pretty stark? or are they sometimes much more subtle?