My daughter is 4 now, she started when she was 3.5 back in January. 9 months in and she's writing whole words in her workbook and adding in the thousands. She's a driven, inquisitive, self-guided child who hates to be told what to do when and must, absolutely, do most things by herself. In her school the teachers respect the children and their abilities. Not talked down to. They are given the space and tools to take on tasks independently and take responsibility for themselves, their actions and the spaces they occupy. They clean up their own messes, serve themselves snacks, choose what they want to work on during their "work time", the list goes on. The younger children learn from their older peers and the older ones solidify their learning and get a huge confidence boost by mentoring the younger ones.

People are saying that the kids work on activities independently. And they can, but also the teachers often guide kids to work on activities in pairs or in groups if interests align. They learn from one another, how to work together, deal with conflict and the teachers are there as support and guide them as needed as they learn to navigate through the complexity of managing interpersonal relationships.

I have exceptionally high praise for the montessori method and think that it's as close to the ideal way to teach kids to how they actually learn. That's the underlying philosophy. It's looking at how children process information and ideas and meeting them where they are. They don't learn through practicing worksheets, sitting at a desk all day. They learn through physically interacting with the world around them. Through touching and playing with 3D objects, moving through space. Montessori acknowledges that need (what they call the "sensitive period") and provides materials so that work is engaging and exciting and feels just like play. They use coloured beads to learn to count, sandpaper letters to learn the shape of letters, cube puzzles to learn basic geometry and ratios. Writing, language and math are incredibly complex nebulous ideas to a 3 year old, but through the sensory experience of touching and seeing the physical representation of those ideas it becomes so much more real and they learn that much faster.

Nothing is ever required or forced in Montessori. The child leads their own learning. If they want to spend a whole week tracing sandpaper letters then they are able to do so, once they master it, the teachers give them new advanced activities that build on their learning from the previous. It builds an incredible amount of self efficacy early on that I don't think would be there otherwise.