Montessori schools helpful?

You really need to visit the classroom and see how “Montessori” is implemented— it can vary greatly. Montessori IS highly structured, but not in the “sit in your seat and do the same thing at the same time as everyone else” way. What i have seen is a busy, quiet, controlled classroom where students are working on different activities alone or in small groups according to their interests and needs. IMO, it is more like the environments he’ll find in the real world!

I love the montessori concept. I would do it in a heartbeat if it was available for my son.

Rover is absolutely correct. Traditional school is nothing like the real world. If it were, people who never spoke up, did as others told them too, and were good at filling out forms would all be multimillionaires.

School prepares you to be a good assistant to the creative person who never fit in at school.

So I guess I should also judge how well my child works with, and pays attention to material while in, small groups. This may be another way for him to simply sit in the group and daydream while it appears he’s listening or learning. Or he may really really shine!

Thanks for helping!

Hypermom,

I work in a Montessori school. Rover’s absolutely correct in stating that you need to visit the school itself. In my experience, they vary widely.

But generally you will find a teacher who is totally committed to the children’s academic, social, and emotional growth and who will carefully document everything and work hard right alongside you to make the child’s school experience the best it can be.

I have worked with many ADHD kids within the Montessori curriculum. I think that, more than anything, your child won’t get pegged with a “bad boy” image in a Montessori classroom and that is probably the single most important benefit for an ADHD child. If your child is ADD without the hyperactivity, you’ll still find that the teachers will figure out a way to give your child the attention he needs to get his work done.

LOL, I guess you can tell that I think Montessori is a great place for these kids.

My tutor told me (when I was considering this for my gifted ADD/LD daughter that “she will fly in the areas she likes and go no where in the areas she doesn’t”. I don’t know if that was a description of MY child’s personality, or the school instruction. I never thought about it after that. (This is a tutor who taught my kid to READ so I thought she was a genius :-) ).

I have heard it is hard to start them in the program “later on”, for instance, middle school. Would that be a concern? She loves school and makes great grades.

How well your child will do in Montessori depends less, in my opinion, on his activity level than it does on his learning style. Is he a creative thinker? Does he like to explore new ideas on his own? Does he like to try to figure out new ways of doing things? If the answer to these questions is “yes”, he will do well, regardless of the ADHD.

If, on the other hand, your child needs to be shown the way, needs examples,
needs concrete direction, then he will probably be miserable in a Montessori setting. I have triplets, and the oldest would have thrived in such a setting, but the middle one would have been miserable, as she needs prompts……an example…….and a sense that there is a right method and a wrong method for doing something as shown by someone.

It really depends more on learning style than on activity level, I believe.

I still say that it depends more on the teacher and the availability of support personnel than it does on learning style. Some Montessori schools really have a limited budget and so they have no support people for kids who require extra help. Some do this beautifully though. They have many staffers, volunteer and paid, who work with children both within the classroom and separately.

My son needed direct teaching in all areas of language yet was successfully educated through Montessori, but not till he got to a Montessori school that held him accountable. His previous Montessori school didn’t. So he didn’t have to work very hard at his reading, writing or spelling. That all changed when he entered the Montessori school with a defined reading and writing program. Direct teaching. Accountability. Without them, he’d have been lost.

Some Montessori schools are using Reading Reflex and even LMB as their reading programs. More and more are looking into these two programs because both, by teaching everything in minute detail and doing so using Socratic methods, dovetail nicely with the Montessori philosophy.

I’ve worked in several Montessori schools for a couple decades now. The classrooms have the same mix of bright, motivated kids, creative learners, independent learners, unmotivated or even lazy workers, slow learners, disciplinary problems, “mystery kids” as do most classrooms anywhere. Most of them do well - I happen to think that the ones who need direct teaching actually get more of it in a good Montessori school (provided the school has a reading program) than they do in a traditional classroom.

If you have a child who struggles in math, there’s nothing better than the Montessori math program, not even within a special ed program. It’s masterfully complete. When I tutor a child in math, I always bring out the Montessori math materials - there’s nothing like their manipulatives.

So maybe the more important questions to ask of a prospective Montessori school are: Do you direct-teach reading? Writing? Spelling? What method(s) do you use? If they respond that they use whole-language, don’t send a child with possible reading problems to them.