Montessori excerpts: ideas for homeschoolers
As always, there are too many things happening every day to mention them all, but I hope this small sector of the whole will give you the overview of a typical day (and a month) in your child’s Montessori classroom. These can also serve as lesson-ideas for home schooling parents.
Holiday season is behind us and children are back at school refreshed and excited to work. Back in December, upper elementary students had a lesson on various Land and Water Forms. This lesson sparked a question: how are mountains and other land forms created? The question, in turn, lead to a discussion about earthquakes, volcanoes, Ring of Fire, and global warming. Each student agreed to research one of the questions and prepare a presentation on their findings. Research papers on these and other interesting topics are now in their finished stage and, after a trial-run and a critique from their peers today, the older students are eager to share their research with the rest of the class this Wednesday.
Biology lessons that called for the outdoor exploration in fall are now being replaced with indoor explorations in the science area. We’ve began our adventure in science with the conversation on what it means to conduct a scientific experiment by discussing the steps of the Scientific Method: ask a question, do background research, construct a hypothesis, test it (by doing an experiment), analyze your data, draw a conclusion, and communicate results. I posed an initial question: which one of these following three materials are the most porous? Grass with roots, hay, or sand? It was the students’ job to figure out how to conduct the rest of the steps. Children wrestled to solve problems like:
how do you make the conditions even;
how do you find identical containers that will hold the three materials, however let the liquid seep through;
how do you measure the porosity of each? With just minimal guidance, our students overcame all the obstacles and successfully finished several rounds of these experiments with the same final answer: hay is the most porous of the three!
Although this aforementioned science experiment involved mostly upper elementary students, another experiment involving capillary action and chromatography (a follow up from the experiment conducted in December) took over our whole class for most of the day yesterday because everybody had to conduct the experiment (several times) all by themselves! And although these science experiments (and many more to come) are prepared by the teachers to support a certain topic in discussion, Montessori students are fortunate to be able to choose to work on any of the 50 or more science experiments available in class any day of the week throughout the year!
A group of children worked hard on researching the history, eating habits and habitat requirements of the guinea pigs. All work was, of course, specifically addressed to better the life of our class pet Danny, the guinea pig. Some major discoveries that surfaced during this research: Danny is not a pig and he is not from Guinea:) After some preparation these students were eager to share their new-found information ( and their pet) with the primary and toddler classes and made appointments to visit each class and present their findings. (At home, use visiting relatives as an audience.:)
Another wonderful way to pass the time during the hopefully short winter is to read books. In class, we have carved out a special reading time every day after recess; that said, you’d be hard pressed to find a moment during any one day when books are NOT being used by at least a few students. There are also the daily 10-15 minutes of history reading and conversations. Studying the ancient cultures allows the children to explore human needs and tendencies of the time and compare these to the tendencies and needs of our own time and culture.
These of course are examples from the daily life of my sizable Montessori classroom where students inspire and influence each others work choices. Children, however, like to learn wherever they are. At home, with just a child or two, the spark can be ignited by you! Why not start a food scrap indoor garden today? (see photo)