Three-year-old Rowan Boudreaux counted beads of different colors held together on little metal chains. He said each number out loud, getting very excited when he reached 8. Then he found a wooden piece hanging nearby with the number 8 written on it and a small metal hook next to it. He hung the chain of 8 beads on the No. 8 hook and moved on to his next piece.

When he was done, he packed everything up and put it back on a shelf at Montessori of Acadiana, a new school in south Lafayette that serves children ages 3 to 6. In the heart of Lafayette, 7-year-old Avery Goodwyn and 8-year-old Renee Morra work together to diagram sentences. They use small slips of paper with hand-written parts of speech and place them on colorful wooden pieces of a sentence analysis kit.