The Five Great Lessons of Montessori Elementary

The Five Great Lessons is a group of impressionistic stories that are meant to provide elementary students with a “big picture” of the world.  At this stage of development, most of the children are becoming aware of the world and how they fit into it.  These lessons can spark the imagination and help children to think not only of the past, but of the future as well.  Stories speak so well to children at this age and the re-telling of these important Cosmic lessons motivate children to research areas that are of interest to them.  

Each of the Great Lessons helps the child to dive deeper into different areas of the classroom.  They might be encouraged to explore topics such as history, geography, math, science and language. Perhaps the most important, children acquire gratitude for those who have come before them.  These lessons contain a great deal of information so it is important to give the children ample time to discover different areas in each lesson. 

I have listed out some possible topics that could be explored within each Great Lesson.  This list is not extensive.  I found it somewhere, but can't remember the website.

The First Great Lesson: The Beginning of the Universe and Earth

• The Universe
• The Solar System
• Composition of the Earth
• Volcanoes
• Rocks
• Chemistry: The Three States of Matter
• Creation Stories

The Second Great Lesson: Life Comes to Earth

• Bacteria
• Plants (classification and parts of: ferns, conifers, and flowering plants)
• Fossils
• Trilobites
• Dinosaurs
• Living and Nonliving
• Classification Work
• Kingdom Animalia (Classification and parts of: insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals)
• Oceans and Ocean Life
• Supercontinents (Pangaea, Laurasia, Gondwanaland)
• Continents
• Mountains
• Oxygen & Carbon Dioxide

The Third Great Lesson: Humans Come to Earth

• Ancient Civilizations
• Fundamental Needs
• The History of:
  • Tools
  • Food preparation and Storage
  • Clothing
  • Shelter
  • Transportation
  • Medicine
  • Defense
  • Art
  • Religion/Spirituality

 

The Fourth Great Lesson: How Writing Began

History of Writing

• Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform Writing
• Different Alphabets
• Different Writing Systems (letters and characters)
• Ancient Civilizations
• The Printing Press

The Fifth Great Lesson: How Numbers Began

• History of Numbers
• History of Mathematics
• Different Number Systems
• How ‘zero’ came to be
• The invention of the Calendar
• Systems and Units of Measurement
• Economic Geography

As you can see, there is plenty of material to cover in between the telling of the Lessons. While it is important to tell the First Great Lesson as early in the year as possible, time should be left between the Great Lessons to give your child the opportunity to explore.  Also to note, the Great Lessons are repeated every year throughout the elementary span of 6 years.  Each year, the child will learn something new or dig a little further into a topic that particularly interests them.  I have presented these to my daughter a few times now and she pulls out different information from them every year because she is a little older and in a different stage of development. 

School days

We have had a few productive weeks of school.  As always, these are just a few shots of some of the work the children do throughout the morning.  I feel like I should carry my camera on my hip, but it becomes quite distracting for them and then they are always wanting me to take pictures of them and not really focusing on their work.  I will be posting a few individual lessons soon, but for now, here are some general pictures from our school days.

 

Nito has been working on the metal insets.  However, he never chooses this work on his own.  I always have to be present with him.  I hope that once he gets the hang of it, he will choose it independently.  It is a great work before handwriting.

When Kui has free time throughout the morning, she always goes to the decimal checkerboard.  It is a good review for her so I let her have at it. 

Nito is showing some growth since the past year.  He is choosing more work independently and will stay focused and concentrated as long as I can keep T-man away from him.  Boy oh boy do those two have some kind of dynamic in the classroom!!

Bubs has been reviewing his clock material.  He was excited that I put the stamps back on the shelf.  It is a nice extension for him since he gets a little discouraged with just the clock material.  He claims that he "can't do it", but when there is a stamp and messy ink, all of a sudden he CAN do it!  I'm just glad he is learning how to draw the arrows on the clock and learning how to tell time the "old fashioned way". 

Kui was reviewing over the parts of a letter.  She did quite a bit of letter writing last year, but I made a quick material for her by cutting up the parts of a letter and having her label them.  For example, the labels are heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature.  She made sure to tell me that this was very easy and that she knew all the parts.  So we will clearly move away from that and on to something more challenging.

 

Bubs did some land and water forms review which I was pleasantly surprised with.  I had spent time at the end of last year making some nice booklets for this work and then he never took it off of the shelf again.  He enjoyed talking about the names and it is a great practical life exercise for pouring.  He has to make sure that water line is exactly to the top of the form.  (Don't mind the non color-coded material you see there.  We couldn't find our metal bucket so he grabbed the bucket from table washing.  He is old enough now though that the colors don't really matter.)

 

 

Nito and I spent some time making this interesting tower.  I had seen this picture on a Montessori school website last year sometime, but never got around to making it.  It took us three tries, but we did it! (Oh actually it took us two, but then Nito ran by it in excitement right before I snapped the picture and it fell over!  So we built it again).  It includes three works from primary: the pink tower, the brown, stairs, and the red rods. 

Bubs was finally presented the subtraction strip board.  I will write up an individual post about this once he has gone through all of the presentations.  He really enjoyed this work.

Nito doing some shoe polishing. 

I sort of gave up on my fantasy of having art lessons on Friday afternoon so I just plopped our art book in front of Kui the other day and told her to read the lesson and do the work independently.  She was working on a watercolor wash and studied the Limbourg brothers.  I have come to terms with (well sort of) my limitations on the variety of subjects we can get to in a given week or month.  Art and music will just have to take a back seat for now.  Kui does piano lessons weekly and is in the choir at church with a great teacher so I feel like she is getting something.  As for art, it is hit or miss.  Two years ago I paid someone to come do a weekly hour and a half lesson with her for art, but it just became too time consuming and costly. 

 

 

I didn't grab any shots of T-man, but he does work every so often at his table.  I have sort of let him roam around more freely this year so far because it is just hard for me to keep bending over, sitting on the floor, etc. with him.  Our baby will be due in a few weeks so I will try to get to some toddler presentations after the baby has come.  Kui does work with him in the mornings when she wants a break from her work and this is very helpful.  

World Map and Continent Box

 

 

Nito was working diligently on the world map this past week.  I never really presented this last year to him or Bubs.  Bubs is really behind on learning his continents and oceans, but it will be good for them to do some group work together to reinforce the information.

After Nito worked with it a few times, he chose a continent box off of the shelf.  Authentic Montessori continent boxes, I believe, have items from the actual continents in there for the child to manipulate sensorially.  For example, maybe a cool instrument might be found in the South American box or a small carved wooden animal in the Africa box.  Ours are just a few different language booklets along with a geography folder with pictures.  (I know pretty lame.....maybe one day!)

Here is a picture of what's inside the Europe box.  There are several three-part card booklets to choose from.  In each box, there is an assortment of animals from that continent, food, instruments, flags, etc.  Then the child can start to associate those different things with that continent and eventually with the specific country.  Some of our conversations with working on the animals or instruments leads to possibly watching a cool video (usually found on YouTube).  Hey, whatever gets the child to be excited about geography and language right?!  Their teacher secretly likes watching these videos too.  I am learning right along with them :)

Sample folder with various pictures and descriptions from some of the countries located on the specific continent.

Picture of ladies in Poland.  This also helps the child visualize the attire, climate, landscape, etc. from these countries.

Sample picture from Croatia.

 

Bubs decided to join in on the three-part cards.

They really enjoyed the animal pictures from Europe.  I have to say there are some interesting ones that I had trouble pronouncing.

First week of 2016-2017 School Week!

Well, we are back at it again.  We officially started school August 1st.  We have a baby coming in about a month and then my oh so lovely hubby is taking the kids on a month long vacation to Kenya while mommy and the baby gets some much needed one on one time.  So....needless to say the kids will miss about 2 months of proper schooling in the classroom.  We will take Sept. and Oct. off, but they will do work while they are away. 

We had a productive first week and I am determined this year to do a much better job of planning and preparing for the school year.  Isn't it funny how much better and smoother your school day goes when there is an actual plan for the day or the week?  I know my kids work better when their teacher is prepared and are much more interested in the subject we are learning about.  It also helps to have library books already in the classroom when you are ready to present a lesson on something.  Last year, I skipped a lot of great resources from the library because I just wasn't prepared and let the little things like that slip through the cracks.  I quickly learned that those "extra" books and resources really help reinforce the idea or point. 

Here is Bubs labeling the long 7 chain. 

I think this year Kui will be helping out with T-Man a lot.  These younger ones take a lot of time and I still have to figure out how to manage working with Kui throughout the day.

Bubs decided to get the moveable alphabet out early this year.  He never really worked with it all the way through the presentations last year. 

T-Man painting.

Painting is contagious apparently.  Nito soon followed.

And then Bubs......

Kui did some math facts review by doing a worksheet frenzy and trying to do it in 5 minutes.  She was a few seconds off, but will try to improve her time next week.

Kui working on the sensorial decanomial.  This is really a work for Bubs, but I thought she could do it for fun and for a good review. 

Nito worked on the number rods and was able to count all the way to 10 without messing up!  I will present the number cards that go with this work next week.  It is exciting to see him progress along with the materials.

 

There is quite a bit of work that goes on with Kui and Bubs in the afternoon, but the camera never seems to be around.  I will be sure to document some of those moments throughout the year. 

Classroom Photos 2016-2017

As some of you know, we moved into a new house about 7 months ago and I am still trying to figure out how to make the space we have in the basement work for our classroom.  We had a pretty successful second part of the school year last year, but I made a few tweaks and hopefully they will work out for us.  I'm sure I will be making more in the months to come since we have a new baby arriving in September!  I have tried to relocate some of the larger book shelves to the more "dungeon" like area right when you walk in the classroom.  There just isn't much natural light there so I put some of elementary books and teachers materials there.  I also tried to open up the classroom a little more by moving our obnoxious tv and couches over.  I decided to utilize our love seat in the arrangement of the classroom to have a cozier feel to it. 

 

 

This is the dreary corner right when you come into the classroom and the dark spot on the right hand side is the bathroom.  I have some elementary language stuff here, random science stuff like the microscope, history charts up top (multi-colored), and the history curriculum (Story of Civilization along with Story of the Bible).  I really just don't have the space to separate all of these things into nice shelves so they kind of each get their own shelf on the same bookcase.

 

This photo shows some of the math shelves.  I decided to add a few more math shelves so that they could all be in the same location and we could have the different materials out for three different age groups.  Ideally, all of the materials are out at once, but with homeschooling Montessori, you really just need what the child is working on plus the material that he will be heading towards.  These materials are on constant rotation it seems like.

Another picture of some of the math shelves. 

 

This is when you are walking into the main part of the classroom. 

Here is where I have tried to open it up a bit and added the couch on the right hand side.  Some of the shelves are still bare because I am trying to finish up making materials.  (Man, that photo collage on the wall looks a lot better in person!  Looks a little crazy in the picture.  I am hoping to add more as the year goes on.  Perhaps it will look better then! Ha)

View of how I tried to incorporate the love seat.  There is a walkway behind those shelves to get to the bigger couch and it is still possible to watch education videos on the tv during the school day.  I forgot to take a pic of the poetry corner I set up on the other side of those shelves.  There is a cute little rocking chair with a basket of poems for all ages.

Another angle....

 This angle is if you were sitting on the love seat.  I have Kui's table in the corner and I moved Bub's table closer to me so I would have better access to him while I was working with her.  I also moved the tall bookshelf and replaced it with the smaller black ones on the left hand side which seems to have opened up the space a little more.

T-man's space keeps getting rearranged.  We moved the large wash basin upstairs to the main living area along with some of the practical life exercises like flower arranging, plant watering, and window washing.  This allows him and Nito to make better use of those materials more often in everyday life.  Plus it frees up space downstairs.  I am in the process of adding more language materials for T-man as well which will take up more space on the shelves. 

View from Kui's table in the corner.

 

Please let me know if you have any suggestions to our classroom or if you wanted a closer look at the different shelves.  I have added quite a bit of language materials to the primary section so I hope Bubs and Nito start thriving in that area!!