This year, The Sammamish Montessori School (SMS) celebrates its 50th-year Golden Jubilee. Half a century of Montessori experience has taught the school that one year deserves special attention: Kindergarten. That belief shaped Montessori+ Pre-Elementary, SMS’s signature Kindergarten year, which brings together the best of Montessori and the school’s hands-on Montessori+ program in one connected day.
Why Kindergarten matters
Montessori children learn in mixed-age classrooms over three years. They join the Primary classroom around age three and arrive at Kindergarten as the oldest, most experienced children in the room.
This is the year everything comes together. Reading takes off. Writing becomes a way to share ideas. Math moves from beads on a table to numbers on a page. Kindergartners also become leaders, helping younger classmates and setting an example for the whole room.
Around age six, children start asking bigger questions: Why does this happen? How does the world work? Where did everything come from? At SMS, Kindergarten is where that curiosity is given room to grow.
Preparing children for a new future
Today’s children will need strong reading and math skills. They will also need to think creatively, solve problems, work with others and keep going when an idea doesn’t work the first time.
The SMS EPex (Elementary Pathway experience) Framework brings this all together. At its center is one simple way of working that children use in every subject: imagine, design, build, test and improve. Around it are six areas of growth, from strong academics to social-emotional wellbeing, the arts and life skills.
The SMS EPex Framework
Six areas of growth around one repeatable way of working
Imagine → Design → Build → Test → Improve
The best of both worlds
At Kindergarten, many families feel they must choose between the depth of a Montessori classroom and hands-on, project-based learning. At SMS, they don’t have to choose.
A day in the life of an SMS Kindergartner
Mornings are spent in the Montessori Primary classroom. Children work with hands-on Montessori materials in reading, writing, math, geography and culture, with each lesson matched to the child’s readiness. The goal is real understanding: depth before speed, and strong foundations before advanced work.
Afternoons bring kindergartners from across the school together as one class in the Montessori+ Studio. Each week centers on a big idea from Montessori’s Five Great Lessons, the classic stories of the universe, life on Earth, human beings, writing and numbers. Children choose from three kinds of work:
Experiments: hands-on investigations they can repeat as often as they like, recording their question, prediction and conclusion on a science report sheet.
Activities: focused table work, such as counting seeds or measuring with a balance.
Builds: design challenges where they sketch an idea, build a prototype, test it and make it better.
The afternoon ends at closing circle, where children share what they made and talk about what worked.
One idea, morning and afternoon
Here is how a single idea, place value, travels through a kindergartner’s day.
In the morning, a child works with the Golden Beads: single beads, bars of ten, squares of a hundred and cubes of a thousand. By trading ten single beads for one bar of ten, she discovers how our number system works, with her own hands.
In the afternoon, the Montessori+ Studio explores the same idea through the Story of Numbers, the Great Lesson about how people learned to count. Children count and record pumpkin seeds, press tally marks into clay as early civilizations did and use them to trade, trace sandpaper numerals, and discover how the invention of zero changed counting forever. They measure the world with a balance and standard tools, recording what they find.
One idea, explored through math, history, language, science and real-world experience. The same approach runs through all five Great Lessons, from balloon demonstrations and geodes to fossil digs, pulleys, bread baking, beginner coding and Friday Theater.
A connected path through Grade 5
Kindergartners spend time with SMS Elementary students every day, so Grade 1 feels familiar from the start.
Montessori+ Pre-Elementary is also the first year of the Elementary Pathway Experience (EPex). Families who enroll at Kindergarten lock in their monthly tuition through Grade 5, with no annual increases, saving up to $40,000 compared with projected standard tuition. EPex Bundled families can also join Amazing Adventures after school, with martial arts, sports, robotics and the arts, and SMS handles all the transportation.
A campus growing with its children
SMS is investing in its Elementary campus to match. A redesigned playground now includes a turf field, a new play structure and a nature area with an outdoor classroom, home to the school’s resident goats. The Lower Elementary classroom has been expanded, and a new two-story Elementary building, with pre-application approval from the City of Redmond, will add three light-filled classrooms for Lower and Upper Elementary.
Come see it for yourself
For 50 years, SMS has helped children become capable, compassionate and curious. Today, that journey runs from Toddler (Ages 18 months) through Grade 5 (Ages 11 Years), with Kindergarten at its heart. The best way to understand it is to walk through the classrooms, meet the teachers and watch kindergartners at work in the Montessori+ Studio.
Explore why 260 families every year have chosen SMS for the last 50 years.
