Kindergarten

The 5 year old child is developmentally more similar to their 3 or 4 year old counterparts than they are to their 6+ year old peers. The 6+ year old child has a reasoning mind, can think abstractly, and is a socially-collaborative learner. The child under 6 years (including the Kindergarten year), in contrast, is a concrete thinker who needs sensory experiences to understand their world and is straddling between parallel and collaborative play. The opportunities for the child in their Kindergarten year to use the stability of their known Primary classroom to make these developmental strides are tremendous. Rather than focusing on and adjusting to all that is new (new environment, new children, new teachers, new learning materials, etc), the child is able to grow their content knowledge, extend their leadership role, and go at their own pace towards abstraction, reasoning, and collaboration.

Kinder Cohort

As a Montessori program whose roots are centered around the development of the child, our Kindergarten program is housed in the Primary (3-6) classroom. Ideally, our program would retain roughly a third of its Kindergarten-aged children so that they would have continuous, robust play and work partners in their own classroom. But, as attrition at the Kindergarten level is common, we hold a weekly program called “Kinder Cohort” to give children in our Kindergarten program the opportunity to learn alongside similar-age peers in the context of their Primary classrooms. In this program, Kindergarteners take turns hosting their Kindergarten peers in their classrooms and plan regular field trips on their own and with the Elementary.