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How does the Montessori Curriculum compare to Public School?
The Montessori Elementary curriculum proceeds seamlessly in subject matter from the preschool curriculum, so that if there are areas in which a child needs to spend more time with the concrete materials, such as the skip counting chains, those are available. The process changes somewhat, allowing the children to begin assuming more responsibility for structuring their choices of work. Children record their work in ongoing notebooks, with each day's work planned out and distributed among the curriculum areas. The teacher reviews this plan daily at the beginning with each child, and then, as the planning and the working process becomes more familiar, weekly.
As they do in preschool, children proceed through the curriculum at their own paces, so that the group as a whole doesn't hold a child back, nor do they move ahead of the child's conceptual ability. This is a much more social age, however, so work is often done in self-selected small groups, and the room is set up to accomodate this arrangement. Recognizing that children of this age have developed the social awareness to understand that they are a part of a larger social and historical contexts, and have differentiated between the work of the senses and the mind and the work of the imagination, the basis of the curriculum becomes the story of the Earth's history, and this is divided into stories called "The Great Lessons" which introduce historical and scientific discoveries about world history adn develop questioning strategies for exploring aspects of natural history. By giving young children a cosmic context for their educational discoveries, rather than small factual and informational chunks chosen by a distant curriculum committee, they are able to continue to fuel their learning with the excitement of explorers, and to integrate their findings into an historical and scientific context which leads them further.
The real question is, "Will these kids be able to handle the same tasks as their public school counterparts?" Will they learn math facts, how to spell, how to capitalize, the stuff they need to take tests later? Yes! All those "basics" are integral components of the Montessori curriculum. But the children will also have the chance to learn the concepts behind the facts, and how to use the information and skills to find out how math is applied, and how to write effectively. Because the curriculum is a three-year cycle, children are not expected to learn on a common time-line of accomplishment. By the second year, most children will have progressed through a certain identifiable portion of the curriculum. As you would be with the current public school elementary report cards, which measure progress in terms of "working up to ability" rather than A- or C+, you will be thoroughly informed at the semi-annual conferences of the specific nature of that progress in skill areas as well as concepts. Some will have done considerably more in one area, some in another. It is one advantage of the program that it gives children time to proceed in their own way. To take a moment in time out of that cycle and decide that a child has not accomplished enough yet may defeat the whole purpose of allowing a child's abilities to unfold. Very few, if any of us, spend our lives proceeding at the same sedate pace through our accomplishments and successes; we tend to have times in which we accomplish a great deal, and times when we process those accomplishments and refresh ourselves to begin again.
