How will my childs education at Montessori compare to a student from a traditional environment?
The basic aid to education in a Montessori school is to follow the natural development of the child. From three to six years, the child is in a highly sensorial period of learning. He is absorbed with how things appear, taste, sound and feel. In the Montessori classroom, these senses are challenged with objects from nature and specially designed equipment. A child must first understand the real world before she can grasp abstract concepts such as math, reading and science. Through didactic manipulative materials, all concepts are brought from the concrete to the abstract. For example, a young child manipulates small golden beads representing units of numbers, ten connected golden beads representing the ten bar, ten connected bars representing the hundred square, and ten stacked squares representing the thousand cube. In this experience, a child can understand the concept of the hierarchies of numbers (units, tens, hundreds, and thousands). This concrete material is used to teach all th
