Posted on 01/19/2015 7:40:58 AM PST by mozarky2
I need information and opinions of Montessori schools. I'm thinking about sending my 5-y.o. granddaughter to one. Many thanks in advance.
“As Montessori developed her theory and practice, she came to believe that education had a role to play in the development of world peace.[17] She felt that children allowed to develop according to their inner laws of development would give rise to a more peaceful and enduring civilization.”
Wikipedia
Speaking in generalities, they are very good for young children. Allowing them to explore and learn what they are most attracted to is so nice. Be sure the school explains how they structure the environment to help the children learn about things they need outside of their areas of natural attraction. A well run Mont. school will have a structure underneath that the children necessarily don’t know is there, but it makes sure they students learn the essentials.
I thought it was a fantastic school. I had my daughter enrolled for a time. If I could have afforded it she would have stayed far longer.
All schools depend on the influence of their owners and families. If you send a child to a school in Berkley there will be a profound difference than if you send it to school in Colorado Springs.
NW Arkansas. And, this school is an open enrollment charter. No tuition...
I sent both of my kids. 2 years for my daughter. She was happy there and loved the structure, but it was terribly overpriced. Worse, she’s now dyslexic and there is some evidence that pushing the ‘early learning’ too early can actually cause problems.
My son made it one semester, then had a nervous breakdown. Yup. A four year old had a nervous breakdown.
In my experience, Montessori schools are oriented heavily to the female learning style and both schools that I had contact with were very anti-male. (Pushing the ADHD diagnosis and medications for boys. Punishing exuberant behavior. One of the most bizarre practices was forcing children to sleep flat on their backs during naptime. If a kid started to drift off and rolled over, the teacher would wake them and make them go to their backs again. When I asked about this I was told that it was for two reasons. First, the rule is ‘back to sleep’. When I pointed out that this was for infants and not four year olds, I was told that this was the rule for all children. Second, the boys tend to ‘hump’ in their sleep. Although this was considered normal behavior, it was something that they didn’t want the girls exposed to.)
All-in-all, I found Montessori to be a huge waste of money and, ultimately, harmful for both of my children in different ways.
I did fix it with my son, though. Found a Baptist pre-school that was run by mothers and grandmothers from the church. They were willing to give a small child a hug if they scraped their knee rather than try to reason with the child to stop screaming. If a child misbehaved, they’d get ‘hey! stop that and don’t do it again!’ then move on. Not a referral to a psychologist. Teaching was kept age appropriate, natural, and playful.
If I could go back, I’d skip a lot of the crap that I tried with my daughter. In my effort to give her my best, I really screwed up.
My son attended a Montessori school for a year.
It was extremely unstructured and children were allowed to do whatever they wanted - he was 5 years old at the time and chose to run around and play all day.
It was OK for us because he simply wasn’t ready to sit down and read or color or listen to stories. But he was happy, and at that time, that’s what matter to us. When he attended regular school, sitting down for any length of time was difficult - he wanted to run and explore and not be confined. I knew he would be fine and when the time came, he would learn what he needed to learn, which he did. I fought his elementary teachers for years on this issue.
He’s currently studying software and electrical engineering at a California UC.
“In my experience, Montessori schools are oriented heavily to the female learning style and both schools that I had contact with were very anti-male. (Pushing the ADHD diagnosis and medications for boys. Punishing exuberant behavior.”
Thanks for the info!
I didn’t find this at the Montessori school my son attended (Thank God, otherwise I would have pulled him immediately).
But, I did find these things at the public school - I fought my son’s elementary teachers (all females, all overweight - which I’ll explain in a sec).
I also fought the principal.
All female-style learning - sit and color (my son HATED coloring) - sit and listen to stories (too restless) - sit and read (impossible!). Plus, all PE was canceled except a mandated “45 minutes per week” - unbelievable! I told the teacher PE was as important as anything she was doing in that room - she “corrected” me and said literacy is more important - well, not if your life is shortened due to inactivity!
Kids like my son - and every other child- needed to go out and run around, needed unstructured play, to throw balls, play in the sand and dirt and get that tremendous energy out of their systems. Not sit sit sit.
He was recommended for special ed, recommended for testing, and I’m sure drugs weren’t far behind. Testing showed he was bright beyond his years. I told the teachers to “leave him alone” - otherwise it was going to affect HIS emotional and physical well-being and health (getting yelled at for acting normal tends to do that). He was not disrupting the class (that was certainly coming) - but preferred to play with leggos and blocks during story time or instead of coloring or build something quietly.
Thank God he had me and his dad to “watch his back” so to speak.
He is now a very well-adjusted, wonderful 21 year old, has tons of friends, is funny, friendly, curious and completely lovable (well, I AM his mother, LOL). At the moment he’s a junior studying math, physics, electrical engineering and software design - he even won a collegiate programming competition his freshman year. You can’t imagine how proud I was of his achievements.
I can’t imagine the nightmare if I’d listened to his elementary teachers and forced him to do what he didn’t want to do which was sit still and act like a girl - or worse, drugged up.
The structure on the children, in terms of cleaning up after themselves, was very good. If the child took out something to work on, they were required to put it back when they were through.
The use of beads and number rods to teach math so the child could understand visually the difference between one and ten and one hundred were invaluable.
Was it expensive? No different than any other Christian school.
Marie Montessori originally designed her pre-school with children who were retarded or marginally below average. Some Montessori’s may be less rigid than others but she felt that children who were retarded needed more structure than others. We registered our son with a program at Mercy College in Detroit in the early 70’s where Sister Innocence ran the program. She was very structured, you wash the dishes, then you dry them, then you put them away-and you need to do the sequence properly or you must go back and complete it before moving on to something else. Our son hated it. We withdrew him and put him in an enriching playschool program with an excellent teacher. Son was later identified as highly gifted. He always resented that label. He’s rather be incognito and has done very well in life.
Montessori does a great job, uninhibited by the government school system.
Personal experience: my son learned reading and arithmetic at Montessori kindergarten. This June he’s getting his Ph.D. in Astrophyics. YMMV.
Frankly, I have always had a sneaking suspicion that the type of things you mention, particularly how Montessori schools are structured to smash little boys into compliance, was the case.
They are not all the same, you might want to investigate the particular school and the people who run it carefully
“Charter” schools are still basically public schools.
My mother once had to have an “Uncle Buck meets the Vice Principal” meeting with my second grade teacher. Mom tells me that she regrets sending her happy joy-filled little boy to government school... they did more damage to me than good.
If you were to walk into a Montessori classroom, you’d not likely notice a significant difference from a good ole American kindergarten. But, here are the key points to Montessori:
* Mixed age classrooms, with classrooms for children ages 2½ or 3 to 6 years old by far the most common
* Student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of options
* Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three hours
* A constructivist or “discovery” model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction
* Specialized educational materials developed by Montessori, like wood puzzles and games
* Freedom of movement within the classroom
* A trained Montessori teacher
Montessori, in and of itself, is not good or bad. It is the specific school that is the key driver. Judge the school, not the program.
My son started preschool at a top tier private school that offered both programs. We were non-Montessori. We moved to Cleveland, Ohio and the top school we wanted to attend didn’t have preschool. So we went to Montessori Children’s School in Westlake, Ohio.
Big mistake. And it had nothing to do with the education. They played dying Indian music and whale screams all day long. Within two weeks of starting, I watched my son’s brand new coat getting into a car several up from ours. I tried to get staff to get it back for two weeks. It finally came back looking like it went through a garbage disposal. They also lost his back up clothes, lost other personal items, refused bathroom breaks, and more.
We left after one semester. We decided to do a lifestyle change and came back to our original school. We won’t leave until graduation.
So, sit in on the school and classroom. More than once. Ask around. Search the web for ratings and comments. You do your homework first.
Good luck!
It depends on who is running it and your child, and what *structure/ or not* the child responds to.
With 3 boys, about 2 years apart in age, I enrolled spawn #1 in a Pre-school Montessori program more for the socialization, and I didn’t like the directress there much. I had already decided to wait until my boys were 6 y/o to enroll them them in kindergarten, based on the reasoning that boys tend to be more immature at that age.The director had no personality and seems like a witch.
While waiting out, and hoping to find an opening in another well-recognized program run by some Italian nuns, I was able to get on a\their waiting list. One of the reasons, I believe, they accepted us, was they saw 2 more siblings coming down the pike.
I may preface by saying, my boys knew their numbers, colors, shapes and alphabet before entered Montessori. They were beginning to sound-out words and getting ready to read.
Spawn #1 seemed to enjoy himself in the activities, he being a very compliant personality. The nuns were very strict and he adapted well to the program and *Catholic-lite*, but from what I observed, there wasn’t enough free-choice and free play time, allowing the kids to pick-and-choose what they wanted to do. It was very, very, very structured, I think b/c it was *old-school* Italian philosophy [not that there is anything wrong with that]
Spawn #2 survived the experience by creating his own mechanism to make the nuns seem as if he was happy there. He plastered a smile on his face the whole time. He didn’t like the home made hot lunches they provided; they forced the kids to clean their plates; that was not in his psyche or the way he was brought up. [We expected them to *try* a food at home, and if they didn’t like it, we wouldn’t force them.]
Spawn#3 had a most difficult time of the three. Every afternoon when I came to pick them up, S-3 would be standing in the corner facing the wall, with his hands held behind his head, being punished. On entering I would look at the headmistrees and shake my head in acknowledgement across the room [**no, not again**] and she would nod back. S-3 would cry all the way home and leaving him off in the morning was all kicking and screaming. I couldn’t stand it.
He hated the food and the structure of the program for a full day. I recognized that he was a round hole trying to fit into a square peg; literally and figuratively.
I withdrew S-3. The dilemma was to find a program in the area that wasn’t filled, it already being mid-September. We did luckily find a small program in the basement of a church; when S-3 visited for a day to see if he would like it, he came home with a hole ripped in the knee of his jeans and smudges of paint on his shirt. This kid needed to play and be a boy and he spent a lovely year in the less structured program.
In all, I would say, it depends on the kid and the program; most schools will allow for a day/trial visit. Before you dish-out the money, I would make sure you and your daughter/or son visit the school to see it in session. *Word-of-mouth* from other parents may not be valid for your GD in comparison. It’s hard to believe that a *name* of a school like a brand is important to some people.
I recall vividly the nuns calling me daily, so worried about our S-3, telling me that they felt they *failed* him, and wanting him *back*. I reassured them that it was nothing to do with them and their program......it was the kid who needed more time to be boy. Since we paid 6 months in advance, I told them to keep the tuition as a donation, even though they offered a refund. I would never disparage Montessori as a system, as many PKs use/borrowed some of the best ideas from Montessori.
The child’s love of learning and value of it comes from you and home.
You may consider that: **Bill Gates, Harvard dropout and founder of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Larry Page and Sergy Brin founders of Google, George Clooney, Katherine Graham, Julia Child and Helen Hunt. Woodrow Wilson built a Montessori school at the White House for his staff and daughter Margaret was a trained Montessori teacher. They brought Dr. Montessori to America in 1915. Alexander Graham Bell and his wife founded the Montessori Educational Assoc. Other strong supporters were Thomas Edison and Helen Keller.**
Good luck with your decision. Your GD will turn out just fine!
I sent my daughter for a year, thinking it was an ordinary pre school. I was wrong. She learned the continents, and could accurately put them together into a world map.
She snuck up to my FIL’s apartment, a granny flat upstairs from our house. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but she found his dry erase board and wrote “Becky have been op here”.
Spelling aside, she was reading and writing, and she was barely four years old!
And then I sent her to public school kindergarten. In that environment, she unlearned everything she knew. She stopped reading and writing, and didn’t pick it up again until about the second grade. The public school methods were entirely different. Not as good. If I had it to do over, I would have left her in Montessory through the first grade. By then, reading would have been second nature to her, and they would only care that she entered second grade as a strong reader.
Homeschool until you can’t do it anymore. You can teach so much more and have so much more fun one on one with her. Take her to the park for kids time.
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