Reply to Is Montessori considered "play based"? Is there much outside time?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Not playbased and I’ve noticed that Montessori parents can be quite obsessed with early academics. They are usually the ones talking about how their Avery is already multiplying in the kindergarten back to school night. [/quote]

There are way too many different models of Montessori to generalize in this way.  AMI schools do, perhaps, tend to be more about rigor, but AMS schools are all over the place.  The Montessori ideal is that children be permitted to move from inside to outside spaces freely, but often schools just can't do this due to space / faculty constraints.  Most certainly still try to have a nature-based component, but some don't really bother at all.

We sent our DD to a Montessori school for 3 years, and it was a very progressive and warm place.  The more educational materials were offered but there was NO pressure whatsoever.  Yes, they weren't permitted to play make-believe with the puzzle pieces, but in DD's 3 hour morning she spent 1 hour outside in a lovely playground where imaginative play was encouraged.  The "work" doesn't feel like work in a good Montessori; think puzzles and logic-based activities, practical life skills like washing (which of course 3 and 4 year olds love!) or snack preparation (cutting apples, etc).  They also gardened and did science-based activities like leaf collecting and identification.

Montessori is super misunderstood by people who haven't experienced it.

That said, I'm not someone who drank the kool-aide; we left Montessori because as wonderful as it was, it just wasn't right for our child.  She needed and wanted more structure and guidance and sometimes got lost in the endless choice of activities.  She was bored as she got older precisely because there wasn't any real pressure put on her.  If she wanted to learn to read at age 5 (her K year), they were happy to teach her; if not, it was felt she'd just learn to read at an older age and wasn't ready until she showed significant interest.  This was hard for a child who wanted to learn to read but wasn't able/willing to take the initiative to pursue reading and writing activities when she was more than welcome to just color and play with blocks all day.[/quote]

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