Frequently Asked Questions

 Bozeman Montessori offers a beautiful and engaging learning environment for children to develop new skills, grow their emotional intelligence, and lean into their innate creativity, imagination, and play. 

Our team of caring guides values the transparent and caring relationships we develop with the wonderful families who join our community. We’ve compiled answer to frequently asked questions as an introduction to our school.

For more than a century now, the child-focused approach that Dr. Maria Montessori (1870 -1952) developed for educating children has been transforming education around the world for people of all ages. What began as a heart-centered, pioneering experiment in the slum of Rome in 1907 has grown into a thriving international movement. 

The Montessori Method helps young children develop their natural interests and innate capabilities. Within this appealing and thoughtful prepared environment, guided by trained teachers, children enjoy "freedom within limits" to pursue activities that align intuitively with each unique moment in their cognitive, emotional, social, and physical development. The Montessori Method supports self-motivation, care for self and others, and a variety of skills that allow children to thrive in school, at home, at play, and in life.

To learn more about Montessori, click here.

All parents hope to find the best care for their young children. Dr. Montessori was a pioneer in understanding the interwoven nature of education and care. While we start from a foundation of creating and sustaining both emotional and physical safety, we also know that the child is hungry to explore the world around them and to develop new skills within a healthy context of positive relationships.

Montessori recognizes that the first six years of life are a critical time to establish a solid foundation for the person a child will grow into and the unique impact they will have upon the world throughout their life. Multisensory, sequenced, and self-correcting activities help each child along the path towards functional independence in these first six years.

Another unique aspect of Montessori is our multi-age groupings. Classroom communities allow older children to model for younger children and enjoy the opportunity to help them throughout the day where appropriate. Young children, on the other hand, get to see where they are going and look forward to more complex activities waiting for them when they are ready. This helps build inner motivation on both sides. The ups and downs of peer relationships in a group setting provide a valuable net of experiences from which a child can spring forward into more complex settings as they grow older.

Montessori schools are not inherently religious, but they do emphasize the importance of respect for cultural and spiritual expression around the globe. There are many faith-based Montessori schools around the world as well as many non-sectarian schools, like Bozeman Montessori.

Maria Montessori was born in the nineteenth century in Italy, and like her contemporaries there, she was raised in the Catholic faith, a background she references in her writings. Beyond her educational ideas, her deeper message is interwoven with an appreciation of the interconnected nature of living systems, and it is clear that she held precious the sanctity of life and the pursuit of peace as vital to the future of humanity. In the Montessori environment, education for peace is not a separate subject to be taught. It is intrinsic to nurturing community at every age, starting with a profound respect for all life and the dignity of our youngest and most vulnerable members of society.

Strong communication is vital to our thriving school community. We love to greet our parents while they are on campus, and we value those face-to-face moments together. Because all communication cannot be in person, we connect in various ways and across a couple of platforms. In the admissions and re-enrollment process, we use Dubsado to share and track all important documents with our families.

Once enrolled, families are invited to join our student information system, Transparent Classroom. This is used for sharing announcements, progress reports for parent-teacher conferences, photos, and everyday drop-off and pick-up procedures. We also share a monthly newsletter with calendar reminders, more details on upcoming school events, messages right from the classroom teachers, and links to helpful resources.

A Montessori education develops students who are capable, aware of their impact, and interested in learning about the world around them in order to flourish as human beings. 

The Montessori curriculum encompasses several areas.

Practical living skills that support functional independence within a community setting:

• Care of Self such as dressing frames, hand-washing, and toileting

• Care of the Environment such as dusting, sweeping, mopping, care of plants and flower arranging 

• Grace and courtesy lessons to learn how to meet one's own needs and work well with others in a group setting

• Transferring and pouring activities using tongs, spoons, and small pitchers which help the child prepare for more complex activities such as

• Food preparation — preparing snacks, squeezing orange juice, or baking projects

Sensorial activities support the discrimination of senses, which eventually progress into science and math:

• Visual discrimination of dimension and form, including basic geometric shapes

• Tactile discrimination with gradations of smooth and rough

• Baric and thermic materials to explore variances in weight and temperature

• Olfactory and Gustatory such as tasting herbs from our gardens

• Auditory such as matching sounds or learning to play songs on our Montessori bells

Language Development:

• Written language begins with oral language, and learning basic signs come before the development of spoken language

• A print-rich environment includes carefully selected signs, labels, charts, books in the classroom, poetry cards, and other examples of the written word that we refer to regularly with young children

• Children develop a strong foundation in phonological awareness, including the ability to break off the first sound of each word before they learn the symbol(s) associated with each sound

• Word building (encoding) from a moveable alphabet gives the children to create the whole before decoding, where they sound out a word

• Multiple opportunities to write, beginning with tracing geometric shapes with our metal insets, using the multisensory sandpaper letters to trace and practice writing with a pencil, and eventually writing the words and sentences built from the moveable alphabet

Cultural Activities are some of our favorites and include a variety of subjects that have previously been reserved for older students, including:

• Geography, starting with land and water molds before moving to puzzle maps and flags

• Zoology, including learning about the five animal kingdoms: reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals

• Social studies including basic history about our local region, country and an appreciation for cultures around the world

• Music, not only in our weekly classes of dance and music, but also with the Montessori bells and basic rhythm instruments

Art Activities are woven throughout the curriculum in all classrooms, and Primary has an art area with rotating activities utilizing a variety of media and expressions:

• Cutting along lines, zig-zags, curves, and spirals

• Paper tearing and paper making

• Pottery

• Basic sewing and embroidery

• Collage and other gluing work

• Exploration with stencils, paint, coloring pencils, markers

Children gain proficiency in these areas at different rates, expressing progress in spurts and sometimes lulls. The teachers observe carefully and take this in stride while supporting the child's growth through all areas of the curriculum to ensure that they are exposed to a balance of the full sequence of lessons. They help the child find that sweet spot of challenging enough to be interesting and awaken that desire to achieve, but not so difficult that the child feels overwhelmed. 

Overall, the Montessori Method nurtures order, coordination, concentration, and independence in children from the moment they enter the classroom. Classroom design, materials, and daily routines support the student's emerging self-regulation — the ability to educate oneself and think about what one is learning — from the earliest years. The sequence of Montessori lessons aligns well with, and in many cases exceeds, state learning standards, ensuring that children are introduced to complex learning concepts through hands-on experiences that lead to deep understanding.

Part of the genius in the Montessori Method is that art concepts are interwoven into all areas of the environment — from the curated books on the classroom bookshelf to the music we enjoy, and a variety of hands-on activities available in the art area. As a first step towards honoring art in early childhood, Montessori guides take great care to create beautiful, inviting spaces in which aesthetics are important. Taking into consideration light and space, natural elements are woven throughout the child's experience. We believe that every child is an artist, and we see experiences with art as one of the most important areas we offer!

For example, a toddler has the opportunity to choose a fresh flower to put into a glass vase with water and decide where it might look beautiful in the classroom. Another little one might explore with paint at the art easel, while another enjoys the wooden pieces of a geometric puzzle. Classrooms include wooden furniture, fiber baskets and containers, natural fabrics, and living plants that need watering and care. Our infant children gaze into a large aquarium, watching the movements of our colorful fish. We choose the materials on their shelves with great care, taking a balance of aesthetics, textures, colors, and shapes into consideration.

As children grow older, we offer an art appreciation program. Created by one of Montessori education's great treasures, Aline Wolf, this approach uses postcard-sized representations of famous works of art and was from the Renaissance to modern art. Young children develop greater visual discrimination as they compare paintings and match cards from the same artist or styles of art.

It's hard to imagine a happy childhood without ample outside time to explore, climb and expand one's sense of the world in a natural setting. At Bozeman Montessori, our children head outside a minimum of once a day (usually morning and afternoon), depending on extreme weather and air-quality conditions. Sometimes, we use our adjacent park space for walks and enjoy the expanded room to run and explore. We encourage all families to send weather-appropriate clothing for all children — even our infants, who often take walks around the neighborhood in our strollers. Children in Pre-primary and older are picked up outside at the end of the day, so keep that in mind as you look at daily weather and plan accordingly.

We believe that all families deserve to have quality options when choosing a home-away-from-home for their children, which is why we encourage you to begin your search early! Our families enroll with the expectation that they stay with us in multi-year cycles, in keeping with the Montessori method. Because of that, we often have limited openings throughout the year. While we would love to accept all applicants, priority enrollment is given to current and returning or alumni families completing the three-year cycle to support the continuity of their child's preschool experience. Admission decisions for new families are largely based on the parents' longterm commitment to the completion of our 3-year programs. Completion of the application plays a vital role in the decision the enrollment team makes when admitting new students to our center. 

To learn more about applying CLICK HERE.

Because Montessori classrooms encourage developing independence, our class sizes are a little larger than in some other settings. In our center, as our children transition into progressively older environments at different times throughout the year, our numbers can fluctuate from room to room. In general, Bozeman Montessori currently operates with these class sizes:

Infants (6 months to 18 months): maximum of 8

Pre-Primary (18 months to 2.5 years): maximum of 16

Primary (2.5 to 6-year-olds): maximum of 28

Each classroom is led by a Lead Guide who is credentialed (or in the process of becoming so) with a MACTE-accredited Montessori teacher training program. MACTE stands for the Montessori Accreditation Council of Teacher Education and is the only authority for measuring quality in teacher preparation programs. It is the umbrella organization under which different Montessori teacher training organizations fall and is recognized by the Department of Education.

Bozeman Montessori builds in about ten in-service days throughout the year to provide continuing education and training for all staff. As a STARS program, our team also takes many hours of additional trainings in their evenings and weekends to achieve a well-rounded basis in child development, health and safety, and family partnerships. 

Bozeman Montessori is a special place because of the faculty and staff who desire to serve humanity through every family in our community — and the larger community around us. These professionals see it as their mission to support parents during a critical time in life in these tender, early years. 

With incredible patience and commitment to the principles within child development, our staff become scientific observers of the child. Natural developmental processes must be honored and supported for young children to truly thrive. 

This takes teachers and staff who:

• have a compassionate heart for service to life

• can adapt to and prioritize within changing circumstances and needs

• are committed to lifelong learning and self-reflection

• enthusiastically model how to become expert problem-solvers ready to meet the challenges of life

At Bozeman Montessori, we're interested in more than just academics — but our alumni families tell us that their children continue to flourish as they progress through elementary school and beyond. We are dedicated to serving the multi-faceted needs of the child who stands before us, while understanding that what we do today also supports the whole person that they are becoming.

Montessori wrote, "If education is always to be conceived [as] a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?... The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities." Expanding our aim to the development of the whole child includes all aspects of the child's well-being — physical, social-emotional including character development, creative, and cognitive capacities.

Dr. Montessori taught that the astounding capacity of the young child's "absorbent mind" begins before birth and lasts until around age six. Contemporary research reinforces the importance of these early years, during which the child effortlessly absorbs incredible amounts of sensory input that helps build neural pathways inside the brain. In fact, 90% of the brain's architecture is in place somewhere around ages five to six, which is why we believe that our youngest deserve the very best we can offer them. Montessori is education for life — from prenatal care through dementia care and later life. Montessori believed that education begins at birth, and Bozeman Montessori offers care for families with children ages six months through six years.

We love connecting with parents to answer any questions as you learn more about Montessori and the unique environment we create.