The Benefits of a Full-Time program: Why Does My Child Have to Attend Five Days a Week? — White Bear Montessori School (2024)

FAQs

Why is Montessori 5 days a week? ›

The primary goal of Montessori involves creating a culture of consistency, order, and independence. Most Montessori school schedules run five days a week because the children have little or no sense of time. When they are working on a task, they are very excited to come back the next day to work on it some more.

Montessori supports social-emotional skills.

Contemporary research supports the 100-year-old Montessori Method's effectiveness, indicating that children who learn in Montessori classrooms demonstrate stronger social-emotional skills in many areas than children in more traditional environments.

Often, children from Montessori environments exhibit maturity above that of their peers. This is generally because Montessori students have been given the opportunity to make independent choices early on within the context of a multi-age peer group.

The principal purpose of Montessori education is to develop the child's natural thirst of knowledge, to develop a sense of order, nurture functional creativity, boost self-confidence and importantly, help develop structure, independence and confidence in learning.

Even if they might not be able to fully articulate their emotions, children share our sentiments towards inconsistency. Coming to school five days per week provides the best consistency and routine for children, which we believe is fundamental to strong development at this early, formative age.

However, the five day work and school week creates more consistency by providing a routine. The five day school week provides greater consistency for education as students can see their teachers and receive instruction for the majority of the week and the weekend bridges a break in between instruction.

The answer is that the Montessori classroom can work for any type of child. The small class size, individualized learning plans, and self-guided learning are all elements that make the Montessori design a good fit for most children. The number of students in the Montessori classroom is intentionally kept small.

Montessori schools believe that children are normally born intelligent, curious, and creative and that all too often, parents and schools make the process of learning stressful rather than natural. We do not believe that most children need external or artificial structure and pressure to make them learn.

Analysing their progress at age five, Lillard found that the children who went to the Montessori school tended to have better literacy, numeracy, executive function and social skills, compared to those who had attended the other schools. And at age 12, they showed better story-telling abilities.

Proponents of a four-day school week argue that it offers several benefits, including cost savings, improved student attendance and increased teacher morale. By reducing the number of school days, schools can save money on transportation, food and energy costs.

How many days is Montessori? ›

Two- and three-day programs are often attractive to parents who do not need full-time care; however, five-day programs create the consistency that is so important to young children and which is essential in developing strong Montessori programs.

This uninterrupted work period is vitally important, as that is when the building of coordination, concentration, independence and order, and the assimilation of information are able to occur. At all levels, students with special needs may need unique considerations, such as: variation in work time block.

Most Montessori schools believe that the age of five is a good point for children to move on. Once they reach kindergarten, children with a Montessori education have learned how to adjust to their environments so much that moving to a more traditional school atmosphere is just another opportunity to learn more.