Reading your child's Montessori progress report

Start with the headings. A Montessori report for a child between 3 and 6 is usually organized by the areas of the classroom, and each heading matches a set of shelves your child works at every morning.

The areas of the classroom

Your school may use slightly different names or split some areas in two. The common ones:

Practical life. Pouring, spooning, sweeping, washing a table, buttoning a dressing frame, preparing snack. This area also covers grace and courtesy: greeting a visitor, waiting for a turn, pushing in a chair. These jobs build the concentration and coordination a child uses in every other area on the report.

Sensorial. Materials that train the senses to notice differences: the pink tower and brown stair for size, the color tablets, the sound cylinders, the geometric solids. A child grading 10 cubes from largest to smallest is preparing for mathematics and for careful looking in general.

Language. Spoken vocabulary, rhyming and sound games, the sandpaper letters, the movable alphabet for building words, and later reading. In many Montessori classrooms children write words with the movable alphabet before they can read them back. If the report says your child is "building words" and you haven't seen reading at home yet, this is the order the report is describing.

Mathematics. Number rods, sandpaper numerals, spindle boxes, and the golden beads, which show units, tens, hundreds and thousands as objects a child can hold. Later work covers addition, subtraction and the other operations using the same materials.

Cultural. Geography (puzzle maps, land and water forms), botany, zoology, science experiments, art and music. Some reports list these separately.

Elementary reports cover more subjects, each under its own heading.

What the progress terms mean

Most Montessori reports don't use letter grades. They describe where your child is with each piece of work. A common set of three:

• Presented. The guide has given your child a lesson on this material.
• Practicing. Your child chooses the work and repeats it. Repetition is how a Montessori child builds a skill.
• Mastered. Your child does the work independently and accurately, and is ready for the next step in that sequence.

Some schools use other words, such as "introduced", "developing" and "secure", or "emerging" and "consistent". If the report doesn't define its terms, ask the guide for the definitions before you read further.

A child who has many items marked "presented" and few marked "mastered" is often a child who has been in the classroom a short time. The three-year cycle is designed so that much of the mastery comes later, especially in the second and third years.

Look for these on your first read

Read the report once all the way through without stopping. Then go back with a pen and mark:

1. The area with the most entries. That's probably where your child spends most mornings.
2. The area with the fewest. Note it. It might mean your child avoids it, or that the guide hasn't presented much there yet.
3. Any written comments. These usually tell you more than the checklist does. Look for descriptions of what your child did, such as "chose the map of Africa 3 days in a row and named each country she placed."
4. Notes on social life and concentration. Many reports include a section on how your child works with others, follows the ground rules and stays with a task.
5. Anything you don't understand. Circle the names of materials you don't recognize.

Questions to take to the guide

Bring the marked-up report to your conference, or send 2 or 3 questions ahead of time. Questions that get useful answers:

• "Can you show me the [material name] I circled? What does my child do with it?"
• "Which work does she choose most often when nobody suggests it?"
• "What is the next lesson you're planning in mathematics?"
• "I see only a few entries in language. Is that her choice, or is it where the lessons are in the sequence?"
• "How long does he usually stay with one piece of work?"
• "Is there anything here you'd like us to support at home, and how?"

Ask to see the materials in the classroom if you can. A guide can set out the golden beads or the sandpaper letters in under a minute, and you'll see what your child does with them each morning.

After the conference, keep the report somewhere you can find it in the spring. When the next one arrives, put the two side by side and look for items that moved from "presented" to "practicing", or from "practicing" to "mastered".