Imagine your child blooms with a passion for dinosaurs and other mega prehistoric animals after hearing a story and seeing a timeline about life evolving on Earth. She spends the next two weeks with two friends using most of their time collecting measurement facts and measuring out with a ruler and string a variety of megafauna measurements. They put on their own museum of drawings and measurements and invite their classmates to view and walk it. During this time, minimal practice is done on the lessons about measuring angles or working with prepositions in sentences. They’ll focus on that when the museum show is over.

Imagine your child has put immense effort over a couple of years into becoming a fluent reader. In fact, it seems like it’s taken a long time, longer than all the other children in the extended family. Suddenly, it seems he’s never without a book. Every day, he comes home for two weeks and says all he’s done is read. Is that okay? The Guide assures you that the flame is burning bright for reading, he’s gaining immense exposure, reinforcement, and wide-ranging background knowledge. This is a season of voracious, eager reading. Other work is happening, new lessons are being given, but mostly – reading. And more reading. She’s observing and not going to set any time limit on the child’s reading at school right now.

These are a few (True! Not imaginary!) glimpses of what we mean when we say Montessori learners have the gift of working at their own pace. The Montessori pace balances freedom, responsibility, individual need, and individual interest.

Montessori Elementary children are not beholden to an imposed timeline of this topic/skill at precisely this time or this is how much time you have before you are assessed on that concept. And then we all together move on to the next unit.

Our Montessori, AMS mission includes serving children who possess “an ample range of temperaments and a variety of learning styles and rates.” Sometimes we might think ‘go at their own pace’ is about an accelerated, beyond ‘grade level’ pacing due to capability and enthusiasm. And we can recognize that there is also time to slow down, isolate concepts, and provide additional explicit lessons and extended repetition for those who need it.