Traditional vs Montessori preschool

Hi suga,

:hide:sorry for delayed reply. As a montessori trained person, i would suggest to choose mont' preschool which gives your kid a lot of hands on experience.

:thumbsupThey learn a lot of skills like arithmetic,practical life skills,judgements and dimensions of things thro' sensorial exercises,cultural skills through science and geography exercises...and so..every thing in concrete way(with touch and thro' senses).quite interesting..

:hiyaThough I don't have personal exp. in US mont preschools,everywhere the structure would be more or less same.As somebody told above our kids will be very systematic and structured in mont sys.

In no way montessori is stressful or taxing to kids,since Dr.montessori's main motto is to allow the children to explore and work with will and freedom in a prepared environment.so they feel happy and relaxed.:coffee

:idea If you want to equip him with traditional style to meet the public school, you can give him some activity sheets from sites like learningpages.com,enchantedlearning.com or edhelper.com samples etc.

starfall.com is a good site for phonetic reading(but he'll get phonetic reading from mont.school itself)

Hope this would help you.
shrivanchi

 

Hey all

I am asking this on behalf of a number of moms (cousins, friends etc) ... please pardon my ignorance here.

If I enroll my kid in montossori or Activity based preschool .... at some point (say 1st std or 5 std), she will need to join the mainstream in CBSE/other syllabus, right?
1. Most of the schools have Mont. only for KGs? Does it mean that the mont way makes the transition easy?
2. If they are anyway going to have loads of writing work and home work from the normal CBSE syllabus, does mont. add value?
3. Is there any school that teaches in mont. way until 12th std? If so how are the grades given and how will they be recognized in the universities ?

While I want my child to learn everything in the practical way, I should not be limiting her opportunities in future.....

 

Ramya,
Montessori is an age-based thingy, so mostly probably till age 6 (which I guess is a little later than grade 1). Most ABL methodologies go beyond grades and really depends on the teacher, not the syllabus. We had this fantastic physics teacher in class VII who actually brought an LP and a player to show illustrate something on lessons on sound.
Syllabus is only about what you need to learn, not how you need to learn.
But coming to montessori schools that go beyond class V, Navadisha is one of them in Velacheri. They start taking children from 1 year 10 months for the preschool.I am told from this year, they are trying to get all children between classes 1 and Vii to sit in one class and each doing his own learning. I dont know how they will up it to class X and above. They follow ICSE.

 

Ramya, I do not have any personal experience with the transition, but I have read that transitioning from Montessori to regular public school system (in US) is easy when in kindergarten or first grade. Children who transition during middle or high school may have a tougher time is what I have read.

Personally I favor the mainstream methods/schools. With strong parent engagement/involvement I believe these can lead to scuccess. I may be proven wrong, though! My first one attends a regular preschool, and chances are that my second will as well.

 

Thanks Tikka and Sindhu.....
I have been having this fight with DH everytime we get into this school discussion. I am for a school on ABL and not too much of pressure to the kid. While DH agrees to that point, he insists that our kid should go to a mainstream school (which comes with home works, books, writing etc etc) and we, as parents must do what we can to aid it.

 

Apologies if this sounds unsupportive, but why are you looking at this stage. Your child has a good two years before you start looking at schools, right?
I am not sure how you look at homeworks, I think they add to calsswork and the learning shoudl continue at home. I dont believe meaningless, writing homework that involves finding answers to exercises that follow the lesson and writing them down x3 works. But homework is not necessarily an evil thing.
ABL or montessori need not always be good you know. There are awful montessori schools too, those who take Maria Montessori's words as gospel rather than adapt it to meet the needs of the current time.
The problem with some alternative schools it becomes very elitist. i am for mainstream, inclusive education. Only, I wish mainstream will become more child-friendly

 

Tikka - No issues, here is the background .... we have 3 children in our family ... my cousin's kid (3.5 yrs from US), my SIL's kid (2.5 yrs waiting to join a school) and another cousin's boy who is in UKG in a Mont school now.
The 3 of them keep chatting on this and I get pulled into these discussions. Since 2 of them are new to Chennai, I thought I will help them out !!
I see my niece at one of the mainstream schools at Chennai and for 1st Std, she has a lot of homework .... which is what set me thinking.