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[quote=Anonymous]We had our twins in Julia Brown Montessori for 2 years when they were 3-5.  It was a great experience for us.

The kids had Montessori class for 2.5-3 hours during the day.  Outside of the Montessori class, the daycare setting was pretty typical for a play-based preschool.  As long as they were not interfering with other children (i.e. disrupting another child trying to play separately vs playing together), or being violent or destructive, they were given free rein to play including playing with toys in creative ways.   They had a significant amount of outdoor time at least two periods of 20-45 minutes, often 3 depending on weather.

During the Montessori period, the room was kept quiet and calm.  They had calming music playing quietly in the background.  Each child had a work space, either a space at a table or a mat on the floor.  There were six subject shelves around the room.  During the class, each child had to complete at least one project from each subject.  The child could pick any project.  Each project had a goal or lesson involved and the children were guided by the teacher or teacher aide in how to learn the lesson from the project.  After the lesson was learned, a child could then take more time to play with the project components or learn more about the project as long as they had time available.  However, a lot of the learning, other than the one lesson per project was self-guided.  Children could pick many or few projects.  They could just do the lesson and move on or play longer with the project.  This was ideal for my twins.  Twin A has problems with transitioning.  In his first play-based daycare, he hated, for example, when he was told to put a toy away and join circle time.  In the Montessori class, it was self-guided.  He would take a project, be guided for the lesson and they would spend 20 minutes making a couch out of blocks or separating the two bowls of marbles by color.  After he did the math project, he could then take the components and sort them by size.  After he did the alliterative letter lesson, he could then make a story with the little objects.  As long as he completed the required six subjects, he was fine.  Twin B however, is bright and has a short attention span.  He would go through about 20 projects in the time it took his brother to do 6-8.  He would do the lesson, play briefly and then go and change to another.  He also changing projects because he would walk near his friends and see what they were doing, talk to them briefly (as long as they kept quiet and didn't talk too long, they were allowed to socialize briefly), stop and get a snack (they usually had fruit and water out on a side table during class), look out the window and then get another project.  He learned so much going through so many projects.  I was told by the teachers that by the time they rotated projects, he had always learned every project, knew them all, and often learned lessons a little more advanced for his age because he had played with the projects enough to learn all the lessons.  Both twins thrived here because of the self-guided nature of the Montessori teaching.

And outside the Montessori classroom, they had the freedom to be active, burn off energy and be creative.  If we hadn't gotten into another pre-school which was our first choice, we would have kept them there for until entering them in public K.  It was a good experience for our family.[/quote]

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