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24 Fredericksburg Parent and Family • May 2015 Providing quality Montessori education since 2001 540-891-9080 Open House: Sunday, 31 May 12pm-2pm www.odysseymontessori.net Why Montessori For the Kindergarten Year? Educational research increasingly shows that students in most schools don't really understand most of what is being taught. In many American schools, children as young as Kindergarten do exercises and fill in workbook pages with little understanding. There is a great deal of rote learning. Doing worksheets can be impressive to parents, but rarely does it demonstrate deep learning. Superficially, it may seem that these children are learning the material, but all too often a few months down the road little of what they "learned" will be retained. These students lack the capacity to take knowledge learned in one setting and apply it in a different setting. Montessori is focused on teaching for understanding and provides concrete sensorial experiences that gradually allow the child to form a mental picture of concepts like how big is a thousand, how many hundreds make up a thousand, and what is really going on when we borrow or or carry numbers in mathematical operations. Montessori materials give the child concrete sensorial impres- sion of abstract concepts, such as long division, that become the foundation for a lifetime understanding. (Text Originally Appeared in Tomorrow's Child Magazine "Why Montessori for the Kindergarten Year?")