Is Montessori Education Effective?

What are the criteria for an effective education—whether it’s Montessori, faith-based, traditional, private or at home learning? Is Montessori education effective?

Here are the fundamental Year One goals for our youngest students:

• Achieving independence through toilet management
• ‘Picking up and putting away’ 
• Dressing oneself 
• Mealtime preparation and cleaning protocols and,
• Becoming a valued member of the family home.

Mommy, if your toddler did all these things today, how much time would you save?

Notice we wrote ‘did’ as in ‘do’ as in ‘do it yourself.’ Montessori is all about DIY and absorbing learning.

Only by learning ‘how to do’ and ‘how to do it yourself’ can your child learn to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and re-focus on self-correction via repetition to achieve success. Achieving success means mastering effectiveness and that means ascending into the primary program.

Effective Primary Education

During Year Two, students continue daily dual Spanish/English language immersion. 

What began as two vocabulary words with the same meaning (like ‘red’ and ‘rojo’) now morphs into full sentences. Concurrently, bilingualism is building knowledge in adjacent subjects like geography, math and the arts.

Students are also midpoint beneficiaries of age-range groupings. In a Montessori setting, the youngest and oldest are grouped together to build social and emotional skills like:

• Respect for others and respect for oneself
• Empathy towards people unlike themselves
• Accelerating their self-motivation to become a ‘big kid’’ and,
• Cooperation, collaboration and communication. 

Then, joy! In Year Three, they’ll blend this new learning and form leadership and mentoring skills for the next group of three year olds.

Effective Kindergarten Education

By the time your child completes Kindergarten, his/her skills are well on their way to knowing ‘how to.’ How to:

• Read, write and conceptualize rather than memorize
• Be respectful and show respect
• Achieve verbal fluency in a second language and 
• Work at their own pace and follow their passion to learn more about what interests them. 

They’ll enter elementary school with a love for learning, a strong sense of self and an understanding of their place in the world. Montessorians call this process ‘creating a whole child.’

Is Montessori Education Effective? Take a tour and see for yourself. You’ll be sure to want to enroll your children at La Jolla Montessori School today. The future needs them.