montessori and other 'special' schools

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Our problem in short: we had a very bad experience with school services and like to help our 6 yo our own way. despite his good academics and mostly good behavior, his regular school constantly forces special services for him. honestly, i have had enough and we are looking into private schools.
he is formal in his learning i.e. straightforward style meaning we can just talk and practice from practice sheets. this is a reason while we went with a "standard" school. at this point we are looking into all other options and i am interested if anyone has an experience with montessory school?

I can relate to is that pulling a child with Autism out to homeschool leads to further regression with social skills. What type of services is your school "forcing?" The opposite usually happens- parents who have children with Autism that excel academically can't get services that the child needs in the areas of social skills and conversation skills. Having good social skills is far more complicated than having polite manners. Teens and adults with ASDs who aren't taught how the NT world works carry a large target for bullies on their backs. The rate of depression for adults and teens with ASDs far surpasses that of the general population.
Also, regarding "practice sheets," individuals with ASDs excel at memorization and learning from rules. Where problems exist would be the area of application of skills to multiple and novel settings. I'm sure there are some jobs out there where use of rote memory is needed, but most jobs require problem solving as well.

Both of my children (not diagnosed but with a few possibly AS-type traits) are in a Montessori school. My 6 year old daughter is in Lower Elementary, and my 3 year old son is in preschool. They both excel where they are, but I have noticed this year that my daughter has more trouble motivating herself to get work done. Since Montessori is child-led education, I think that certain personalities tend to do better than others. My daughter is bright but can wallow in indecision if left to her own devices . Next year we plan to move her to public school...the biggest reason she is in Montessori this year is because her birthday is just past the public school cutoff. Long story, but it made the most sense to keep her there for this year.

I also think it depends a lot on the school & teachers, as usual.

Chronos: thanks, I was reluctant to try Montessori just because of that however the thing that you proposed might work. we anyway make sure that his academics is on track and we are very good with math (and son seems to be good too).

Stubbydog: yeah, my son has self-motivation problem. he doesn't even play if not ordered to. we'll see. thanks for sharing.

it probably depends more on the specific school and the specific teacher than on any particular philosophy. In my experience, a school with a more flexible attitude is best, regardless of its underlying philosophical leanings. I am especially wary of schools which are convinced they've got the magical solution that works for everyone...there simply is not one thing, one method, one answer that will work universally for every child. Often, schools which are doing very well by standardized measures and which have a strong academic reputation fall into this category.

I like montessori. My kids did well in a relaxed montessori environment. But too-rigid adherence to montessori philosophy is as much a problem as any other. Example: Montessori says that kids must progress through certain stages of activities and demonstrate mastery before they can move on. However, it does not address the fact that some kids will be so unmotivated by the easier stages of something that they will not demonstrate the required mastery. Some of them need to be given the more advanced material first. You need a teacher who recognizes that each child is individual.

And, homeschooling does not stunt social development. There are an overwhelming number of non-school activities that homeschool kids can be involved in and most of them are more positive social environments than school.

All I can really tell you is that you need to be careful. Some schools will take your money and do little to nothing for your kid.

Power and intelligence differences. NTs have different things that interest them at six and ten and sixteen and twenty. A normal teenager (not us) wants to talk about boys all the time, whereas a (normal) six-year-old doesn't really understand sex yet. Also, up until, say, twenty, most people want to be older, or look older, and have an aversion to seeming babyish. So, hanging out with little kids... yeah.

Our society has decreed that you gain power as you gain age. Part of that happens naturally-- you gain in life experience (and, generally, wisdom) as you get older, and you also get bigger and stronger-- and part is cultural and legal. (That part is stupid and needs to go away and maybe die a million deaths.) Relationships are based on equality. You have to be on a roughly equal footing.

If a seventeen-year-old complains about difficult math homework, he's probably struggling to remember the quadratic formula. If a seven-year-old's math homework is diffult, he's probably having trouble grasping division. There's no way to sympathize there. The seven-year-old can't help the seventeen-year-old. If the seventeen-year-old tries to help the seven-year-old, he'll probably get frustrated, or look at how easy it is for him and lose respect for the seven-year-old. With something like that between people who are closer in age-- within a year or two-- there's equal give and take, and understanding because they're working on similar things. Differences in aptitude mean they can both help each other, whereas if they have the same aptitude they can commiserate.

The way you play and interact changes with age.

There's an odd sort of weird cultural thingy where people think kids can't stand up for themselves, therefore hurting/defeating them is BAD, therefore they have to always defeat adults. Relationships are based on give and take. They're not precisely wars, but a lot of the time there are friendly battles, and relationships thrive where both parties do everything in their power short of taking it seriously to win, and neither party wins much more often than the other. So it can be hard. The child might just lose all the time. So that's not good. And letting them win is no good. But defeating them is supposed to be BAD. So they have to win all the time, making it not really a friendship.

That said, it's been my experience that intergenerational friendships work just fine with only slightly more effort. Sometimes not even that.

Some personal experience with Montessori that may or may not be related to my relationship with the Autism spectrum - I was placed in a montessori preschool 40 or so years ago. The way it worked in that particular classroom was that you had to complete each individual part of a lesson before you could progress.

The problem was, I learned to read between my first and second year of preschool - and, by read, I mean books with sentences. The school required that children be able to read "books," which were packets containing unrelated groups of words before they would allow you to read a story on your own. Without knowing that was what I was doing, I went on strike. I knew I could read fluently, had no interest in following rules for rules' sake (this was also an issue later with SRA's, remember them?) and so I would go to the "wash the shell" station every day and wash the shell for as long as possible, stopping only for the group activity and snack.

I would hope the curriculum has adapted to allow for outlier children, but I'd check and make sure they have a strategy for kids who refuse to do the work because they have already learned the subject matter.