Reply to Montessori School of Arlington -REVIEWS NEEDED

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Parent of a current Montessori student here - my DD was in Montessori starting at age 4 at Drew, then MPSA, and now at Gunston Montessori Middle Years program. Very happy with all stages of the program.  At MPSA, faculty, administration, and extended day staff were supportive and fellow parents were engaged.  Gunston middle years program has 70-80 in the back trailers and students can participate in school wide activities like band, orchestra, sports, theatre, and clubs.  Curriculum is more structured with weekly assignments and grading, though they still have flexibility to choose project topics. There are a lot of group projects but this may be true of traditional students as well.  We appreciate the socioeconomic diversity of the program which is built-in to the lottery process at the pre-K years.[/quote]

Do you feel like the Montessori curriculum is challenging and preparing your child for high school?[/quote]

Yes and for the real world as well.  There was a big jump from elementary to middle school in terms of pressure and amount of work but I heard that is true for other non-Montessori APS middle schoolers.  Getting used to routine testing and weekly letter grades was a challenge (since elementary just had "meets standard" targets), but the grading scheme is required by the school of all students.  The Montessori method has definitely helped my child with workload management and comfort level in advocating for herself and her classmates.  In the middle years, there is a transition to a more traditional style of learning by 8th grade, and the content itself seems challenging.  Almost all the core classes are considered "intensified" but students who need extra help enroll in more fundamental classes and the more advanced students can qualify for accelerated math (i.e., pre-algebra at 6th or 7th grades). As parents, we are actually asked not to intervene to help with school work but encourage our child to reach out to individual teachers for support, which is working well. In the Montessori program, each child prepares and delivers their own custom presentation for the parent-teacher conferences (this has been the case since around 4th grade) in which they cover their strengths, improvement areas, and goals, which is good preparation for the real world.

Good luck with whatever you decide - from what I can tell, there is no "right" path and kids can do well across a variety of different options with strong parent and teacher support.[/quote]

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