The Kindergarten Classroom curriculum is for children ages 5.
During the Kindergarten year, the child can work with these materials in more depth, assume leadership in the classroom and establish critical learning habits.
Hours for Kindergarten Full Day classes are 8 AM – 2:30 PM.
Extended day is available from 7 AM – 6 PM.
Every year thousands of Montessori parents whose children are about to move up to kindergarten face a common dilemma: do they allow their children remain in a Montessori environment or do they transfer their children to a more traditional kindergarten program. Although there are plenty of issues that factor into this important decision, most Montessori administrators, educators, and parents will agree that perhaps the most compelling factor for most parents has to do with basic economics.
Although each family must make this decision on their own, we offer a number of thoughts which should be considered before transferring a child in the kindergarten year.
- In Montessori schools, learning is not focused on rote drill and memorization. Our goal is to develop students who really understand their schoolwork.
- Montessori students learn through hands-on experience, investigation, and research. They become actively engaged in their studies, rather than passively waiting to be spoon-fed.
- Montessori is consciously designed to recognize and address different learning styles, helping students learn to study most effectively.
- Montessori challenges and sets high expectations for all students, not only a special few.
- Montessori students develop self-discipline and an internal sense of purpose and motivation.
- In art, he/she will learn about artists, art styles, techniques and mediums, rather than learn the basic colors.
- The Primary Montessori curriculum is much more sophisticated than that found in most kindergartens.
- Montessori math is based on the European tradition of unified mathematics. Montessori introduces young children to basic geometry and other sophisticated concepts as early as kindergarten.
- In many Montessori schools, five-year olds are beginning to read the Junior Great Books; kindergartners in other schools may be learning to recognize letters and numbers.
- Five-year olds have a real sense of leadership in their classroom community.
- Your child has waited for two years to be one of the five-year-old leaders of his/her class. The kindergartners are looked up to as role models for the younger students, and most children eagerly await their opportunity to play this role.
- In Montessori, your child can continue to progress at her own pace. In traditional kindergarten, she will have to wait while the other children begin to catch up.
- Even in kindergarten, Montessori children are studying cultural geography and beginning to grow into global citizens.
- In Montessori, five-year olds work with intriguing learning materials, like the Trinomial Cube instead of coloring books and insipid basal readers.
- With the Land and Water Forms, he/she will learn about lakes, islands, isthmuses, straits, capes, archipelagos, peninsulas, and other geological forms, rather than circles, squares, and rectangles.
Please click here for an overview of the Kindergarten Curriculum.
Please click here for the Kindergarten Year in Montessori.
If you still have any doubt, spend a morning observing in your child’s class and compare it with a morning in a kindergarten class in the other school you are considering. Sit quietly and take mental notes. The differences may be subtle, but most likely they will be significant. Then project your child into the future and ask yourself how the positive differences you observed in the Montessori classroom might help shape your child to become the teenager, and later the adult, you envisioned for your child’s future.