Why Montessori for a Third Year?

For many parents who have had their children in Montessori pre-school, the logical step is to continue Montessori into the third year. Parents also may wonder where a good transition time might be if your child is joining another education system or school.

Below are some of the advantages of continuing a Montessori education, at least through the third year.

The Montessori learning experience is cumulative: what a child learns in the third year depends on what he has learned in his previous Montessori years. The third year is the culmination of this learning. In many ways the previous years are wasted if the child does not continue working with the Montessori materials to complete the three year cycle.

In the Montessori environment there is great emphasis on having a child use the concrete manipulative to transition into abstract thinking. The third year is the time when the transition should not be broken. If the transition is allowed to take place in the Montessori environment, children will learn to read, do mathematical operations and begin to think about the world in terms of inter-related facts. It is a social time as well, when children are starting to interact with each other in work and play, and to pay attention to the thoughts and feelings of others.

There are crucial differences between a Montessori preschool experience and a traditional one. In most traditional preschool classes, the primary emphasis is on developing social skills with some preliminary work in cognitive “readiness”, whereas, in a Montessori classroom the primary emphasis is on developing cognitive skills on the firm foundation of sensory and motor skill training. In a Montessori classroom, a child progresses at his/her own rate; there are no pressures to “catch up” or “slow down” to the level of the class. The child working at his/her own rate develops good work habits such as initiative, the ability to process information, and the ability to persist in completing a task. The emphasis is on making each child feel competent in his or her own abilities and interested in learning for its own sake.

At The Children’s House, the student to teacher ratio is lower than most traditional pre-schools.

This allows the teacher the opportunity to concentrate on presenting the detailed math and language materials to the children. The child gets a very strong foundation in these “basics”. There are also science, geography, social, art and large motor activities. In all these areas, the child learns actively through planned and spontaneous activities.