Is Montessori elementary worth it, or should we switch at six?
Elementary is where the habits built in preschool get used — long research projects, collaboration, work planned and finished by the child — so switching at six means replacing those habits just as they become useful.
Elementary Montessori is not preschool with more reading. The work gets genuinely hard, projects run for weeks, children present what they have found, and the curriculum opens with the largest possible frame — how the universe, the earth and human beings came to be — then hangs the specifics off it.
Almost every Montessori school within reach of South San Francisco stops at kindergarten, which makes this a choice most local families never get offered. Mills goes to fifth grade.
Where to go from here
Other things parents ask
Still deciding?
Call the school office at 650-616-9000, or come and watch a morning.