Montessori 3rd Great Lesson: Coming of Humans

“Human consciousness comes into the world as a flaming ball of imagination.” –Dr Maria Montessori After the “Coming of Life” great lesson follows the “Coming of Humans” story. We have been studying the different eons and eras, and we’ve studied fundamental needs of humans by going camping and visiting a wool farm; here’s some of…

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Model Heart Review

If you’ve been reading my blog for longer than a hot minute, you may know I’m super-spatially challenged. I’m not great at construction sets, puzzles or building things. I was a writing major; I do know how to use semicolons and commas. Can’t do it all folks. I mean, I can’t. I do, however, have…

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Timeline of Life Mural

Speaking of “painting windows” in my last post… I always forget to share activities we do to the blog. So here’s one of the activities we did at the end of January for the Second Great Lesson (Coming of Life). I keep reading about the “Mural of Life” used in Montessori classrooms. Aside from the…

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Making a Model (scale) Solar System

Do you know how big our sun is compared to our home planet? Can you visualize that? After our model solar system activity, we got a good idea for the sizes of the planets. Originally I’d really hoped to take the kids on an adventure around town showing the scale and distance apart, but even…

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Fundamental Needs of Humans: Wool Field Trip

Life’s gotten crazy lately; I know I don’t have to tell you that. With everyone stuck at home lately corona-quarantining, how about we take a virtual field trip together? Recently, we were very privileged to meet a local artist who keeps sheep for wool and weaves beautiful textiles. What a fantastic opportunity to learn about…

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Primitive Arts and Stone Age Festival

We recently went on a field trip to a Primitive Arts and Stone Age Festival to learn more about the Third Great Lesson. The main highlight of it all was learning to throw the atlatl; we took turns hunting down a Wooly Mammoth. Having recently visited the skeleton of a real Mammoth, we determined we…

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Montessori Timeline of Life and Fundamental Needs

The Montessori Great Lessons are a series of stories that tell the single cosmic tale of the Earth from its creation to the marvelous interconnectedness of mankind. They’re the framework all of Montessori elementary is based on; these stories inspire the kids to want to learn math, science, language and more. For the third cosmic…

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Inside Our Animal Classification Boxes

I had a few requests to see inside our animal classification boxes since we recently revisited them for our “2nd Great Lesson” science shelves. I made these boxes a while back to help drive home the key characteristics of animal classes. We have a box for mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and one general invertebrates…

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What’s On Our Science Shelves?

Tour of our science shelves here I posted a tour of our science shelves for the 2nd Great lesson on IGTV today. I had some requests for our materials used, so I have the sources here. Some are affiliate links (at no cost to you). Hope this is helpful! Montessori Services: Timeline of Life. I…

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