my kids both go to a Montessori preschool near our house and they are DEFINITELY a real Montessori school.
mornings they have a typical Montessori curriculum, the kids do a lot of "practical life" activities like table washing, wood polishing, tracing using metal insets, flower cutting, apple cutting, etc. It sounds very domestic but it's got a couple of purposes:
1. the kids develop motor skills that will be necessary for writing -- the school teaches cursive first because little kids tend to make lots of loops and they like to start each letter at the bottom naturally. things like washing tables and windows mimic these movements.
2. the kids develop focus and concentration -- they can kind of settle down and enter an almost meditative state doing these things, which is good for them.
3. the kids learn independence. they learn that they can fix their own snacks, dress themselves, clean up after themselves, etc. and they get a boost in self-esteem knowing that they are capable of doing these things for themselves.
they also have academic exercises that help prepare them for reading, math, geography, science, and other things. some examples:
- there's an activity using symbols of different colors and sizes that correspond to different parts of speech, it's like a precursor to sentence diagramming. the teacher will say something like, "please bring me the brown horse" and the student will pick out a brown horse, then match the big triangle to the noun "horse" and a medium triangle to the adjective "brown". eventually they start adding verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech.
- there's other activities and games focusing on math, like number rods, spindle boxes, and the Golden Beads. using these the kids learn about the decimal system, adding and subtracting, and then eventually multiplication and division. they get a more intuitive sense of what numbers and the different arithmetic operations mean.
- they also have classroom activities relating to geography and science, like relief models of islands, peninsulas, lakes, stuff like that. the kids pour water into the models and see how an island is surrounded by water on all sides, lakes are the opposites of islands, etc.
in the afternoon the program is a little different. the smallest kids can go home for lunch but kids who stay for the full day will eat lunch, then have a nap, then they can have some outdoor play (depending on the weather) and then there are enrichment activities that cost extra, like karate, Spanish, Irish dancing, etc. or if they aren't doing enrichment activities they can play or do music, read, etc., like in a daycare.
our school also requires a certain number of volunteer hours each year, the parents take turns providing snacks and doing laundry and recycling for the classroom, plus there are Parent Information Nights that are semi-mandatory and fundraising activities that we are more or less expected to help with. they also have an International Week early on in the year, you can provide food, do a presentation, or provide a book or a CD for the classroom related to your heritage, that sort of thing. and there's two field trips a year and two school picnics a year too. so participation keeps us very busy.
it's a good school though, tuition isn't THAT expensive compared to other schools, and my kids are learning a lot. My older daughter could already read when she started there but she's also learning a lot about geography and science, stuff like stars, weather, plants and animals and stuff. it's harder to tell what our three-year-old is doing but she does say she spends a lot of time doing "puzzle pieces", lol. she loves puzzles and her teacher says she is doing some fairly complex ones for her age. but I'm sure she's also doing a lot of the other activities like precursors to arithmetic and reading. my mother-in-law pooh-pooh'ed the place as just teaching how to keep house but it's really a lot more than that -- and honestly, I work all day, it's nice to know that SOMEONE is teaching them stuff like how to sweep the floor. I'd do that if I were at home, of course, but oh well, since I'm not, I'm glad they are learning it somehow. my husband's parents both worked when he was a kid and I literally had to teach him how to separate laundry, how to wash dishes, lots of stuff like that, I guess he never had to do chores. *sigh* but I guess that's neither here nor there.
edit: meant to add this to my (already quite long!) post...
as for the "learning at your own pace" stuff... at least at our kids' school, the teachers do push the kids a little to do work in subjects they are not interested in. so even if your kid doesn't "feel" like doing the number rods and learning her addition and subtraction, on some level they are required to do it. For my kids I think it's good that they are able to advance at their own pace because they are pretty quick and I don't need to worry that they will be bored or held back for the sake of the rest of the class, plus if they need extra help to learn something, the class is small enough that they can get that extra attention.
I was always ridiculously advanced in school and since I was in public school, my mom was at the school nearly every week riding the teachers' asses to get them to let me do more advanced work. she pushed them to allow me to use a more advanced book for spelling homework since the one we were using was way too easy for me, she pushed them to get me into a more advanced math class (in the end I wound up in a separate "learn at your own pace" math class with a handful of other kids), she pushed to allow me more advanced reading exercises, etc. And this was at a gifted and talented charter school that I had to test into (and that's a whole other separate ball of worms that I'm not going to get into here).
Nowadays, with this whole "No Child Left Behind" crap, let's face it, I don't see smart kids getting a whole lot of the teacher's attention in public schools because, well, they aren't the ones keeping test scores down. Public schools are going to focus their efforts on the kids who are struggling to pass and who need the help. The smart kids are going to get ignored unless you're willing to be on the administrators' asses every week. My husband knows that I'm not in favor of sending our kids to a public school, I'd love to keep them in Montessori as long as we can. But he doesn't agree with me. We'll see. Not all schools are created alike so maybe we can move in the next couple of years to a place with a better public school system -- the one we're in now is mediocre at best.
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