Frequently Asked Questions
How does Montessori preschool differ from day care?
Montessori is education…not a nursery school. Before the age of six years, much of a child’s intelligence and social characteristics are formed. It has been said that 50% of the child’s mental development occurs before 4 years of age. In a Montessori School, your child will learn to think in logical patterns and to deal with reality. Children with a Montessori background become better prepared to cope with the complex challenges of tomorrow’s world.
I ask my child what she did at school, and she says “Nothing.” What is she doing all day?
A young child of 3 or 4 may be busy all day, but unaware of their activity. Young children may also have little recall of things done several hours earlier. They have an amazing ability to be totally engaged in the present moment. Children become more conscious of their activities, and have better memory as they age. By the age of 5 or 6, your child will probably be giving you much more detailed information about her day.
At the end of the week, my child doesn’t bring home any papers or projects. Is he wasting his time?
Your child is undoubtedly very busy all week. Many of the activities that he does are “process” oriented, not “product” oriented. Your child may spend lots of time pouring, squeezing, sorting, and matching, and have nothing to bring home to show you. Nevertheless, he has been busy all week developing important motor skills, visual discrimination skills, and classification skills.
Don’t be concerned if your child doesn’t bring home much “product” from school. The Montessori classroom is intensively “process” oriented. Since your child will discover things through experience before the teacher applies a name to the discovery, he might tell you he was “just playing with beads all day” and have no conscious awareness that the activity is something we adults call “addition”.
What are all those tiny bits of paper my child brings home?
Those tiny snips of paper may represent a lot of careful work! In the Montessori classroom, the children have small strips of paper with different lines on them to provide practice in cutting. While the child may think the point of this work is to cut the paper into tiny pieces by following the lines, actually the child is getting a lot of practice in concentration, co-ordination, and developing important fine motor skills that preceed writing.
Acknowledge the child’s careful and attentive work as you discover these snippets! You can also use it as an opportunity to point out familiar shapes: triangles, rectangles, and parallelograms!
