Reply to Help! Shining Stars or AppleTree CH?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Because you have a neighborhood school as a back up option, I would hands down choose Montessori over AT.  You should be willing to, however, commit to the three year cycle.  Just because your child might not like an activity in year one is not a reason to take the child out,  because children change quickly and all of the activities, even the practical life skills, build on one another. Kids may not like everything and the beauty with Montessori is that there are multiple activities that attack the same skill in a little bit different way.  I have been pretty hard on SSMA and would not send my kid there--I would choose private Montessori before I would deal with their disorganization  (and in fact did) because of my personality; however, given the choice between AT and SSMA I would hands down choose Montessori over AT.  This is from a parent who has left Montessori because I think and IB/Expeditionary learning model is better for my kid, but absolutely the years she spent in Montessori were fantastic, she learned a great deal, and grew as well.  The inquiry based approach within a disciplined environment can't be beat.[/quote]

I'm the poster who is sending my child elsewhere for the rest of elementary school, despite liking Shining Stars. It wasn't that she didn't like one activity in year one - it was that she basically hated school for a year, cried about 1/3 of the time at drop off (had been in daycare for 2 years previously with no such issue). I agree generally that the year she spent in Montessori gave her skills she wouldn't have gotten in her play-based preschool/daycare before, but I also do not in any way doubt that Montessori was not a good fit for her. Some kids just don't take to it. [/quote]

PP and others who have had kids in montessori preschool, is it correct that there is no storytime or group reading? One poster above noted that her 4 YO was reading at AppleTree. Do children in Montessori learn to read at an early age? I know that they do tactile things with letters, arranging letters, etc, but are they acquiring a love of literacy?[/quote]

I'm the PP. One of the issues my daughter mentioned was that she wanted to learn how to read. What she was doing at school was a combination of writing/reading pre-work. They focus on the beginning sounds and ending sounds, which helps with sounding out words. But for whatever reasons, she wasn't getting to spend as much time on that as she wanted. She REALLY wanted to be able to read, and it wasn't happening at school as fast as she wanted. We started working with her at home on simple books and she picked it up really fast. I think that the WAY that Montessori teaches reading is good, but a lot depends on the relationship between the student and the teacher. My impression was that DD wanted to focus on that and skip the sandpaper letters and metal insets for the writing component and was told that she had to do both. At home, we did a lot of sounding out words and rhyming and then later, when she knew a bunch of words, she wanted to learn how to write them, so we started working on that.

I think the Montessori system works better if you stick with it through the whole primary program. Each skill they work on in the beginning builds the next one. With my DD, she desperately wanted to read comic books and so she wanted to do all the work RIGHT NOW rather than taking her time mastering things one step at a time. [/quote]

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