You have chosen a Montessori education for your children. Chances are, when you came to tour WMS, you did not know all that entailed. Just as your children are learning many things, most likely, so are you. One of the things that differentiates a Montessori environment is the multi-age classroom. A foundation of Maria Montessori's educational practice is that of the planes of development. As you can see from the graphic, each plane highlights the work of the child during that time. She, like many neuroscientists who came after her, recognize that children continue to grow and develop well into their twenties; this is the beginning of that developmental progress.   

Within each of these planes of development, Dr. Montessori divided learning into three-year age spans: birth through age 3 (toddler/pre-primary), 3 through 6 years old (early childhood/primary), 6 through 9 years old (lower elementary), and 9 through 12 years old (upper elementary). There are many benefits to these groupings and, as you know, our school will reflect these groupings in all of our classrooms by the 2015-16 school year.

The three-year age groupings allow children to learn from each other as well as from the adults who are with them each day. They have the opportunity to hear the ideas of those who have explored them before and not only learn their friends' ways of thinking, but develop their own as they are listening, observing and experimenting. Collaboration is evident and ongoing in a Montessori classroom. Children are talking to one another, asking questions, wondering about ideas, and ultimately trying them out and receiving feedback from their work, their peers and their teachers. They learn to respect one another and recognize the safety of their community as they work together to obtain a desired result.

In considering the classroom environments of children in the same plane of development, one can appreciate the similarities to our adult lives. We also seek out those in our "plane" and ask for help, share an idea, or work together to solve a problem. Most of us do not work in isolation; rather, we collaborate, question, support, encourage, experiment and learn. The Montessori classroom allows for this process as well. We are helping children gain the knowledge and skills needed to become citizens of our world. By the time they are in middle school, high school, college and beyond, they have had countless opportunities to wonder, to learn from others, to question, and to understand how not to settle for what is but to instead dare to ask what is possible. 

Your children are the future of our world. You are giving them the best possible beginning, an environment where they can learn to understand others and most importantly themselves as they develop and move through the developmental processes that lead them firmly into adulthood.