In Search of a Pre-school

Last week Smita & I started searching for a pre-school for our daughter. She will turn 3 in July and we want her to join some school in Fall of 2010. She goes to an excellent day care right now, but we have a feeling that she’s starting to get a bit too old for that place and a pre-school setting would help her more.

The search is turning out to be quite daunting, especially when we don’t even know what we are looking for in a school. We just went to one of the open houses on Saturday and I still haven’t formed an opinion on the school. The main requirement would be proximity to home or work, but beyond that everything would be fair game. We are visiting 4 more schools this week and so hopefully some comparisons will make things a bit clearer.

The other problem is a lack of feedback on the schools. Most schools do a good job of marketing themselves, but real reviews are hard to obtain. There is no Amazon.com for schools where you can just go and read what other parents thought about these schools. Most of the feedback that we’ve gathered is from the parents email list at Microsoft and so far it has been helpful for us to narrow our list down to the schools that we will be visiting but not much more beyond that.

As far as the nature of the school is concerned, I am looking for a more child-centered, Montessori-like school. Having been to a Montessori myself I feel that it is more developmentally appropriate for children of this age rather than a classroom style academic school. The later type of schools have a tendency of burning out kids too soon or increasing childhood anxiety due to undue emphasis on achievement.  At this age, I would want a school which would nurture her natural curiosity and build a sense of initiative and self-esteem rather than teach things. The school should help children problem solve, cooperate, improve social interaction etc. Academic subjects may be learned as long as the child is ready for them and not taught in a formal manner. Though, I expect some sort of balance between learning and free play and that the free play is guided to help the child learn various aspects of life.

Of course, not all Montessori schools are built the same and a lot depends on the individual teachers more so than the school. Moreover some schools are more dogmatic in their approach than others. But let’s see where this search leads us and what we find. And it is definitely a lot of work trying to gather and assimilate information about these schools into a coherent opinion.