To Doubledip - I currently have twin boys in montessori K and my dd in 2nd grade at the same school. She went to regular public K and for various reasons unique to her I switched her at the start of first grade. It's a charter school so it's free from first grade and up, but we pay for K because it's a full day program (the school district only offers half day K). I plan to keep them there as long as the situation works for them, so we play it by ear on an annual basis. My kids are bright but with some learning issues - kind of a 2E situation - so the reason montessori is ideal for them, at least in theory, is that they can be ahead in some areas and behind in others. Primarily, though, two of them are visual-spatial learners who do not learn as well in the traditional public school classroom, which teaches to an auditory-sequential learning style (the opposite of visual-spatial). There's a lot of other stuff involved (therapies, etc.) but dd is finally reading above grade level, closer to her supposed ability level, and I can't say enough great things about my boys' K experience. Knowing what dd learned (or didn't learn) at the public school K, well, both boys, even the one with severe speech and fine motor issues, are far, far beyond what she had learned in K, and the year's not over yet. There's no way they'd be where they are now academically if I sent them to the regular K (one of them does 4-digit subtraction now and was counting to 1000 in preschool; the other one, whose strengths are very different, is reading very well). For one thing, there just isn't the exposure to these other concepts and for another, there aren't the manipulatives, the works that the kids learn from. Indeed, I shudder to think about it (I almost left them both in a special ed preschool that's part of the public system since they had IEPs, but they would have been bored to tears. I dumped the IEPs and paid for private therapy and enrolled them in preschool at this montessori). My three older kids are a little different, at least two of them anyway, and they do so much better in the montessori environment. Imagine my surprise when the most "normal" (academically) one was identified as underachieving in preschool by his montessori teacher - not because he wasn't meeting expectations for the age but because she thought he had a lot more potential. She was right and I was shocked that she came up with that on her own. She said she prides herself on knowing her students very well.
A word about schools - they're only as good as the teachers and principle. It seems from what I have read that there is a lot of inconsistency among montessori schools since there is no way to limit use of the name. My advice is to talk to the teachers about their (montessori) philosophy and see if that works for what you think your kids need.
FYI, lower and upper elementary are quite different from preschool-K in some ways though the philosophy remains the same. A critical component of that, for my family, is the ability of a child to take their learning as far as they can go, without limit by grade level. Of course, teachers have their own philosophy on some of that - sometimes dd will tell me, "no, that's a third-grade work" which is just wrong - so you have to be on the lookout.
My soon-to-be three year old will start at the same school in August, and I can't wait!
I think I have a fever so I don't know if I'm making sense lol...especially since I just realized I replied to this thread already. but that's my two cents for Doubledip.
