It’s never too early to prepare your kids! More and more parents are discovering that daycare can be a “pre” preschool for their kids, and the Montessori method, which makes learning FUN is a great way to introduce them to a lifelong love of learning. This is why we welcome parents to drop by at our Fremont Montessori daycare location in Niles Blvd.
In the Montessori method we don’t divide the children by age. This is something that the education system has foisted upon us, but it doesn’t make any sense. At home a younger child grows up with his elder siblings. When he plays with other kids out on the street or in the park he is playing with kids of different ages. But put him in a classroom and all kids have to be the same age!
Back in 1912, Frederick Burk, the first president of what became California State University in San Francisco said of the age grouping system: “It is constructed upon the assumption that a group of minds can be marshalled and controlled in growth in exactly the same manner that a military officer marshalls and directs the bodily movements of a company of soldiers. In solid, unbreakable phalanx the class is supposed to move through all the grades, keeping in locked step. This locked step is set by the ‘average’ pupil–an algebraic myth born of inanimate figures and an addled pedagogy. The class system does injury to the rapid and quick-thinking pupils, because these must shackle their stride to keep pace with the mythical average. But the class system does a greater injury to the large number who make slower progress than the rate of the mythical average pupil . . . They are foredoomed to failure before they begin. Could any system be more stupid in its assumptions, more impossible in its conditions, and more juggernautic in its operation?”
Sir Ken Robinson, in his famous TED talk about education agreed: “Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture.”
In our Fremont Montessori daycare we let the children mingle together and there can often be an age difference of three years in a class. The older children act as positive role models for the younger ones and will help them when they can, which helps to underscore their own learning and self-esteem too.
We encourage parents who are considering daycare for their child to come into our Fremont Montessori daycare in Niles and to see for yourselves just how well the children get on together.