At BUCCLEUCH MONTESSORI, we understand that the first few years of life are perhaps the most critical part of the education process. Your child’s brain is forming 700 new neural connections per second —there’s no other time in life when their brain will be so open to learning or so influenced by their learning environment. (Harvard’s Centre on the Developing Child) Harvard’s Centre on the Developing Child calls this stage in brain development a time of “early plasticity.” That means your child’s brain is rapidly absorbing the stimuli around to set up the framework for how it will learn and react for the rest of their life. After the first five years of life, the brain loses its plasticity and it becomes much harder to influence how your child learns. For this reason, choosing your child’s preschool could be one of the most important decisions that you make about their education. You want to find a program that lays a foundation for a lifetime of passionate learning, one that will nurture and guide your child as they set off on their educational journey.