My granddaughter has been in a Montessori preschool program for 2 years, and this fall, she’ll go to her neighborhood public school kindergarten. Her parents are concerned about the transition - from a small, somewhat unstructured environment to a larger class with a schedule and rules. My main concern is that she’s already academically ahead of the average kid starting kindergarten and she’ll end up being bored and a behavior challenge. (She explained the difference between lava and magma to me - that’s a step or two beyond knowing her colors.)
Her mom is a teacher, and she did acknowledge that kindergarten is the time to learn how to go to school and the teacher deals with kids from all sorts of backgrounds - preschool, day care, or stay-at-home. But she worries about how her daughter will adjust to a more structured environment.
So I figured there might be Dopers who had kids, grandkids, or know of other kids who made this educational leap. I’d love to hear any experiences.
My son went to public kindergarten after several years of Montessori. At that point he was beginning to read. We mentioned that to the teacher and she assured us that they were able to accommodate each child’s needs. We were concerned that the worksheets he brought home were things like tracing letters or naming colors. At the first parent teacher conference the teacher said “he can read”. And we said yes, we told you that when he started. It turned out that they had done virtually nothing special for him at all.
The final straw was when he came home one day and told us about an exercise they did. The children sat in a circle and they passed around a box. My son was first. The teacher asked him who was the most important person in the world. He said Leonardo Da Vinci because he was both an artist and scientist. Now you may think that is a pretty good answer for a 6 year-old, but the teacher told him that was incorrect and to open the box. Inside was a mirror, to show children that they are the most important person in the world. So they took an exercise, presumably intended to build self esteem, to tell him his perfectly good answer was wrong. There were just so many things wrong with that, that we put him back in Montessori the next year.
Unfortunately, this particular school only goes thru kindergarten, so keeping her there isn’t really an option. I do feel it will be an advantage, tho, that her mom has been a teacher for 14 years - she’ll be aware of more of what may be available than the average parent. I hope.
Many kids going into Kinder haven’t been in any sort of school at all, so the “less structured” Montessori will still be more structure than what some, maybe most, of her classmates are used to.
As far as academics go, we never really expected the school to challenge our son the way we wanted him challenged, so we always supplemented. Boredom was not a problem, because the social element was still really interesting for him. Doing things with other kids, even if they were intellectually simple, was still a really new and neat experiment.
As he has gotten older, the boredom has become more of an issue: there’s more individual work to be done with first. However, once he was old enough to take a book and read it when he was done, that fixed a lot of that. He just reads, and all that reading is probably doing him more good than any acceleration the school could provide. We still supplement math and Latin at home.
I think most kindergarteners have one or two highly specific areas of knowledge where they know more than others around them, even adults. For another kid, it might be the argument about whether pterosaurs count as dinosaurs, or some obscure fact about astronomy.
And I don’t think that, at the pre-school level, there’s all that much distinction between “Montessori” and “non-Montessori”. Any pre-school worker is going to be focused primarily on keeping the kids playing nice with each other, with what they’re learning about anything else taking a distant second place.
I do personally have experience with this transition, though I transitioned at a later grade (from 4th grade to 5th grade). What I remember is that Montessori had some unstructured* time (mostly in the morning) but it also had structured times where the whole class did things together (often on the little carpet in the room). I didn’t find the structured time to be difficult to adjust to—if anything, it made it easier not to get caught up spending too much time on any one thing.
I was indeed ahead in many areas, but I never really found it to be a problem. They realized I was advanced in math and put me in the higher math group. They also got me into the TAG (talented and gifted) program. Other than that, I mostly just enjoyed being able to get my homework done quickly, often during class.
There were some classmates I know who didn’t have as great a transition, but the main issue was just that they seemed to forget a lot of the stuff they’d learned. And the ones who had some behavior difficulties at Montessori would sometimes backtrack on the transition. But those who didn’t have behavioral problems didn’t have them in school, either.
*I call it unstructured because you did, but I think of it more as self-structured. You still had rules about what you could do. It wasn’t just playing together. You would go get fun things one at a time from the shelf, play/learn with them, then put them back. Truly unstructured playtime was still only during recess.
I don’t know about Montessori but Kindergarten here is an all day everyday schedule in a lower elementary building. I don’t think they even have a nap/quiet time during the day anymore like when my kids were little.
There will be routines to the day but I think it’s a fluid structure and not a stay in your seat for hours learning the three R’s.
And I’ve seen in classes seats, that are a wobbly stool or a bouncy ball, for those who can’t help but fidget.
Two of my kids went from Montessori to first grade, while the third transitioned at kindergarten. All three of them adjusted just fine. In fact, one of my kids was completely unaware that the Montessori environment he started out in was in any way different than what he went through in public school.
My daughter is headmistress and teacher at a small private middle/high school (a junior Naval Academy, but not what one considers a “military school”) and she had one student who’d been in Montessori till 7th or 8th. She said he had a really tough time adjusting to the very strictly defined atmosphere at her school. It took him a few weeks to figure things out.
I agree with you here - I just used the word my daughter used. I follow the school’s FB page and I see the different activities the various levels do. But it does strike me as less rigid than school as I knew it. Then again, I was in elementary school in the 60s so things have changed some.
I’m hoping the only big difference my granddaughter notices is now she’ll ride the bus instead of having her dad drop her off. I know she’s definitely excited about that.
These comments are reassuring. I’m not as worried as her parents, but change can be more of a challenge to some than to others. Guess we’ll find out this fall.
How does Roxie handle change? That could be a good clue about how she’ll handle the change to traditional school from Montessori. Seems to me she did splendidly well adjusting to sharing her parents and grandparents and becoming a big sister. That bodes well for her.
My grandkidlet, same year and circumstance as Roxie, also acquired a baby brother, did fine with it. Did 3 years of Montessori then all day public school kindergarten, nary a blip. Except she is adamant that Montessori school snacks and lunches are better (her preschool meals were catered by the University student cafeteria they shared a campus with).
My daughter went from Montessori to first grade. I don’t remember her having any real problems, though it was hard to tell as I had gotten divorced from her mother and her mother had gotten remarried all during that time. I know the one thing that I didn’t like was that my daughter was writing in cursive because that’s what Montessori taught, but the first grade teacher forbade her from writing in cursive so she had to start over with writing. I think that took her some time to learn.
I think that’s just poor teaching (and given the rest of your post, probably an issue with that specific teacher/school rather than public schools in general). How hard would it have been to say “Wow, that’s a great answer! Now, open the box and you’ll find another answer inside…”? Also, I’m not convinced the intended lesson is a great one anyway - most kids think they’re the centre of the universe as it is. And may well turn into adults with an outsize sense of entitlement. I guess it’s good for kids who may come from less loving background.
In the UK, the first year of formal schooling (known as “reception”, which most kids start at age 4 and turn 5 during that academic year) is intentionally a very soft start - it has to be, to accommodate the wide range of abilities and backgrounds. Some kids won’t have been to nursery/pre-school at all. I don’t think you need to worry. We don’t have specific experience of going from Montessori to school, but our older son managed the change just fine and it looks like our younger son will too, in September of this year. Going to any kind of pre-school is a definite advantage.
As a parent of an elementary-school teacher, I’d say at that age don’t worry as much about what’s going on in the classroom as long as your child has a solid home life.
She gets frustrated with many parents who don’t provide support and guidance for their children at home and then come to parent-teacher conferences complaining about their child’s lack of progress or their behavior issues, expecting the teacher to solve issues that really begin at home.
Oh boy. This was once true, absolutely–but one of the effects of Common Core and standardized testing, for better or worse, is that there’s tremendous pressure on kindergarten teachers to have a more rigorous academic curriculum. Students are learning phonics and numeracy and other skills from pretty early on in the year, with less time for free play and creative exploration.
Hmm. That’s interesting. I can’t remember if I was up to cursive before second grade, but I do know we still learned to print before we learned cursive. And I don’t remember having much trouble switching back and forth.
I wonder if it’s more a UK/US difference, I understand that what you call cursive is more “joined up writing” and not a particular way of writing every letter that differs significantly from print. I could see the issue being that she had to learn to not join up her letters. That could be a hard habit to break.
