Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Montessori vs. dedicated gifted school

It took me a full year to realize that he had been doing the *same work* the entire time--work he called the "scratchy letters." When I realized this, I told him that if he wanted he could do something else, that he just had to tell his teacher that he was ready to move on. So then he moved on to some word thing that he did for *another* year. The thing is that he could already read simple text before he even set foot in the school (at age 2.5). He didn't need to go through the Montessori sequence. I told them all of this, but their stance was that the child needed to decide how to spend their day. I ended up homeschooling him after his time in the Montessori preschool. He did a two year stint at a private school from ages 10-12, and he is currently attending a few classes at the public high school.

I've now raised two kids to late teen/young adult ages. The reason I advocate for play-based preschool is that there is *plenty* of time for academics down the road. In fact, I'd argue that for gifted kids, there is *far too much time* devoted to academics, because they pick things up so quickly. A kid only has so much early childhood in which to play and imagine. I see now that those years are precious, and there is no reason to waste them on structured academic learning.

Of your two listed choices, the Montessori sounds preferable. However, I’d urge you to ask some pointed questions of the head of schools and teachers before enrolling to build out a personalized learning plan. You don’t want your child spending 3 weeks on the letter a...

DS7 is in a Montessori elementary school, and I am certain he would have hated the Casa sequence. He was able to read at 2 like Kai’s son and thrives on conceptual discussions that extend and apply abstract thinking. Montessori, with its rigid insistence taken in many schools on concrete to abstract progression, doesn’t respect the needs of young abstract thinkers who can skip ahead of physical works.

Also be aware that, if your child is science minded, that Montessori is extremely weak in science, with focuses in language arts and math. Anticipate that you’ll have to teach science at home if you want it covered adequately.

I will say this; for older (6+) students who have good autonomy and executive function, the licence for self-directed work is difficult to achieve outside a Montessori setting. Ultimately, for HG+ students, I think the key is finding a good instructional fit; one that respects the needs of the individual learner.

Thanks again, everyone.
I completely agree. I know in my personal elementary school experience, finishing seemingly pointless worksheets only led to more worksheets. I got completely overwhelmed by the amount of paper involved and that was probably involved in me mentally checking out of school. I do know that while the gifted program is deliberately assigning a lot of work, they believe it to be meaningful and interesting work. I have talked to a teenage student who said that she never felt like her homework was a waste of her time, it just took a lot of effort to accomplish the tasks. I just don't know what to ask the school to really tease out necessary work vs. work for the sake of work. I suspect the appropriateness of any given assignment depends on the student to whom it has been assigned. I do think that a child can have valuable and fulfilling experiences outside of school during hours not spent on homework.

I think about the ZPD a lot when helping my daughter with things, I'm constantly considering how to scaffold her to accomplish something she wants to do, and when and how to taper the support. The Montessori model, done well, seems like it's more likely to allow students to work in their ZPD. I like the focus on independence but am not sure whether it would curtail scaffolding ... too much. My concern real concern is whether a teacher will notice when a child is working below ZPD, particularly when that child is exceeding typical grade-level expectations, and what the school would do about it.

You really are describing something like the one of the worst-case scenarios I�d worry about in a Montessori environment. One I would want to avoid if it all possible. It sounds like this school was trying to imply that your son spent a whole year on the letters because they were "following the child." Do you think it�s really the case that he actively decided to pour himself into the sandpaper letters? Or were they failing to notice he might have needed to be explicitly offered something else? My understanding is that a classroom may contain more advanced works that are off-limits to a child until the teacher has decided that a child is ready. Do you know if they were rigidly boxing him in to the sandpaper letters until he�d done some particular sequence of activities each and every step? Were they offering any other choices? Did you see any sign that he was developing other skills, like handwriting or spelling, related to these activities? Or was it just a dead-end?

I know my does not need instruction on individual letters at this time, though she�s still figuring out some phograms at this time. I do think she would enjoy the phonetic matching games and the writing. I�d prefer her to be able to jump through parts of the language curriculum if she encounters something she�s already mastered, rather than be required to do unnecessary repetition ad nauseum. That is its own kind of busy work...

Do you think the preschool years your son spent in Montessori (inclusive of the hours he spent in recess and outside school) wound up including significantly less imagination and play than that of your other child(ren)?

Regarding working abstractly in elementary school, what does that look like when compared to using the concrete works? Does he, for instance, use pencil and paper instead of the number beads? Whatever he is doing now to move through the curriculum, do you think he would have been required to show mastery through means limited to the concrete if he had attended Casa? If, hypothetically, he had attended Casa and you had become concerned he was being held back from abstract thinking, can you think of any accommodation you might have been tempted to request of the teachers to meet his needs? I�m trying to figure out what to watch out for and what questions to ask the school.
I have been told that the local Montessori school does the Great Lessons curriculum and that this includes science presentations and experiments. Is this what you son�s school does? Do you think it lacks depth in particular areas of science, or in scientific experimentation and documentation generally? Are you using any particular materials at home to supplement science, if there are any worth recommending?

All of this! When I was looking at preschools I toured a few who were really proud of their worksheets and homework. Oh, my!

Both my children attended and loved Montessori preschools. They both progressed quickly through the curriculum, even though the per-enrollment speeches always sound like your child will have to do so much drudgework before they learn anything. But really, it was fine.

I think the key to a good Montessori experience, however, is having a really solid Montessori teacher. A Montessori classroom should fell orderly and purposeful, and should stress real-life competency activities along with more academic stuff. I always say the 2 top things my son learned in preschool were phonics and how to safely slice vegetables with an actual knife.

Preschool + worksheets + homework equals run away. Funnily the only preschool I have ever come across that had homework was the one at the university I attended in the early nineties (NZ). I didn't know many people with preschoolers at the time so I don't know if it was common or if they were experimenting on the kids.

Thanks again everyone. We went with the Montessori option.


I'm hoping she gets an experience like this. I'll try to remember to update for posterity later after seeing how it turns out.

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.

Thanks for coming back and giving us an update. It sounds like though it wasn't quite the path you were expecting, you learned a lot about her as a learner, she doesn't seem to have suffered any real harm, and ultimately your current situation is meeting her needs for the moment.

What an interesting update. I have one who loves to learn, but only on their own terms. And always prefers to be invisible in the class. They could not bear to "fail" but are absolutely without interest in teacher pleasing, or in being "the best", in fact actively avoid being noticed for doing well. This make school really tricky. I really related to this :

"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."

I think that this is an incredibly powerful observation you have made, and you have described it delightfully without judgement:

"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."

There are many things to learn about your daughter, and teaching environments in this passage and you will doubtless be able to reflect back to this many times, hopefully in ways that help you help your daughter.

Yes, exactly. In some ways 20/20 hindsight suggests a different placement could potentially have been a better fit. But we learned so much about her last year and wouldn't even have the 20/20 hindsight without what we learned.