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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would not send my boy to Montissori. They can't talk at lunch, and I don't want to stifle his imagination. For instance, if he wants to pretend a car is blasting off like a rocket. He would be told not to use it in an unintended way. A car drives on the road. Plus, it's very expensive. No thanks. [/quote]

Those are not Montessori rules. [/quote]

+1.  Unfortunately, it seems that the Montessori school that you tried had their own rules in addition to the Montessori rules that they imposed.  As with any type of school, each school is individual and outside of the general teaching practices, procedures vary.

For our experience, Montessori has been wonderful.  We are about to switch our preschoolers to a play-based preschool, but it has nothing to do with the school, but due to external reasons.  After being on the wait-list for 2.5 years, we got into the preschool at my work and the convenience plus a number of other factors led us to move them for K this coming fall.  One of the things we love is that our school has a sense of community.  It's a small school and we seem to have have a birthday at least once a month.  We get invited to parties for kids in the other classes sometimes because the classes often mix on the playground.  We go to parties and we see a lot of kids and families that we recognize.  A lot of families are local to our suburb and we have bumped into other families at the supermarket, local restaurants, etc.

In our Montessori, the kids do talk a lot at lunch.  So much that they have favorite friends they like to sit near.  Lunch and playground times are the times that they have a lot more leeway to do things including blasting off like rockets, singing, etc.

As for using things in the "right way", every Montessori project has a lesson to be learned.  The teachers guide the students to learn that lesson.  After they have accomplished that lesson, they can spend as long as they want with the project doing whatever they want with it.  In observation I have seen a child learn the lesson and then spend 15 minutes being creative and playing with the project like open play in a play-based program.  The director of our Montessori school is a second-generation Montessori teacher.  She was taught by two of Maria Montessori's early students so she got a lot of guidance pretty close to the source.  She has said that this is true to the way that Maria Montessori suggested, e.g. that every project does have a lesson to be learned and that students need to be guided to learn that lesson, but that after the lesson was learned, the child had plenty of time to be creative and explore.

That said, just as any other form of education, one size does not fit all.  And judging by our kids' classroom and classmates, there is no "type" that does best in Montessori.  We have pretty active Tasmanian Devils who do well there.  They have classmates who are very different types.  A quiet and shy boy that needs to be encouraged, and the teachers do.  A bossy, center-of-the-known-universe queen be who is the center of the kids playgroup on the playground and the teachers handle her very well.  One hyper child who has difficulty sitting still and the teachers work with him.  He works off  his energy by doing a lot of movement.  How?  When he picks up his projects, he picks them up one piece at a time.  He goes and gets piece A, brings it back to his work area.  He goes and gets piece B, and stops to look at little Larla's project, goes back.  He goes to pick up piece C and stops at the water fountain on the way back.  He finally gets all of the pieces and the teacher makes sure he learns the lesson.  He takes 4 trips to put things back.  It's fine.  They keep an eye on him and keep him from getting too distracted but they do give him leeway to be hyper.  I have also seen several kids of similar types who were at the Montessori only a short time and the parents opted for a different form of preschool.  So, I think it is much more about the individual child and the individual school than it is based on style of school.

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