The prepared environment of Montessori can be a wonderful environment for learning and the hands on manipulatives are great for the hands on concrete teaching of math concepts. That said, take a really close look at the Montessori school. True Montessori is extremely structured and rule bound and leaves little room for divergence from the rules or for differences in learning style. It does not seem that way at first glance because it allows each child to learn at their own speed. It does not however, allow each child to learn in their own WAY. The child must learn in the Montessori way. It can be a wonderful education if it is a good fit. One of my sons thrived in Montessori. He was comfortable within a framework of rules and boundaries. My other son considered rules and boundaries to be challenges that must be tested and he would have considered it to be unbearable torture to have been trapped in the Montessori system. I am not talking about behaviour here, but about learning style. The idea that there was only one way to arrive at an answer was just not believable to him and he, who will be 21 next week, would still be sitting there with some of those blocks convinced he would eventually find a way to get more than the alloted number of blocks into the cube. He therefore would never have mastered the skill and would never have moved on to the next skill. Montessori is very concrete sequential and just does not always work well for the random abstract child, especially the stubborn ones. However, many of the Montessori schools are not pure Montessori and have relaxed some of the rules to accommodate a wider variety of learning styles and are more a platform for self paced multi sensory learning. Angel