Montessori Philosophy and our USA unit study

I've been doing some reading and re-reading of Montessori philosophy this summer.  I thought I'd share my thoughts about how our studies -- specifically our USA unit study -- fits in with my interpretations of Montessori teaching in the early elementary grades.  As I have three kids spanning the two age groupings (both 3-6 and 6-9), I use elements from both.

**We will be starting the year by creating paper maché  globes. This is ED's first (formal) introduction to the world and globes. When I told DD and LD about this, they were excited and said they wanted to make globes as well.  I have big plastic bouncy balls on hand and we'll slather on paper mache and do our best to make reasonable representations of the seven continents  and the oceans with paint, glue and sand. (Keep in mind, it'll be the process not the end result!)

**We will also start off the year with the First and Second Great Lessons.  It has been nearly two years since we did the First Great Lesson (coming of the universe and Earth) and a year since our Second Great Lesson (Coming of Life-the geologic timeline).  I plan to do these presentations and all the drama over a two or three-day period. If you want to learn more you can visit Miss Barbara's Great Lessons page or Montessori Albums Great Lessons pages or explore the links put together by Montessori Mom.  I think these lessons are really useful for giving the kids a broad overview of the universe, the world and life.  Having this broad overview, they can then better understand how smaller ideas and details fit into the big picture. I like the idea that the kids gain a picture of how they fit into the universe and the immense timeline of life.

**Review of the World -- continents and oceans (this is new for ED), continent song

**USA in relation to the world --
     Physical Geography:
          North America mapwork, What is the country like?
          How big is it?
          What are the major rivers, mountains and bays?
          USA pinmap           What is the climate like?
          Landmarks
     Political Geography:
          What are its neighbors? (and perhaps Rock the Capitals, Central America to go along with this)
           Symbols

**This unit also seemed perfect since in the early elementary years there's an emphasis of taking children out into the world for real-life experiences.  This unit takes advantage of our location here on the East Coast. We have plans to see the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell, White House, Washington Monument, and Mt. Vernon (and perhaps other places, but we'll see -- that's already quite ambitious!!)

**One issue that I have with myself and our homeschooling is that element of self direction and self-led learning.  The kids definitely have their areas of interest. LD, for example, reads and follows his passion for science. You will often find him picking up and reading chemistry, physics book or reading through our vast Horrible Science collection. He designs and sets up his own experiments (often with help from Mom and Dad to gather materials, etc.). But when it comes to other units of study, I often bring forth the materials and we explore topics that I have sought out and set forth.  Anyway, just wanted you all to be aware that there is a beautiful element to Montessori philosophy that is under scrutiny for our homeschool.  I am tossing up changing our homeschooling style a bit -- to be both more structured and more autonomous and independent for the kids.  I'm still thinking this through though before I can share anything further here in blogland!

***OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!! -- I wrote this post and had this set to send out since we were on holiday visiting family.  While we were away I found out that I was the winner of Karen Tyler's year long Montessori training class.  I've had a sneak-preview of the albums and what we will be learning over the course of this next year. (My class starts Sept. 1! Hooray!!)  It BLOWS MY SOCKS OFF!!!  I am a voracious reader and have pretty much read all the books and resources I can get my hands on regarding Montessori philosophy and stuff... Karen's albums make me feel like I knew nothing... and I can't wait to get started learning and re-planning for this next year.  The course is geared towards 3-6 but let me tell you, LD will benefit from my training course as much or more than little ED here!!! 

Anyway, stay tuned as I revisit our homeschool style and structure. I'm on a new journey and I'm SO SO excited!!

Trash-o-saurus Measures in at 9 feet 9 inches by 4 feet 8 inches

We had so much fun with our huge dinosaur project.  A teacher on a website I saw somewhere (sorry, I forget where) mentioned having her class make a "trash-o-saurus."  I thought that was a brilliant idea, especially as we have SO much packing paper from our move.

We looked around the yard for some items to help us make the structure (bone system) of our dinosaur.  The previous owners left a lot of stuff back in the woods, so we scrounged up some left over wire fencing and formed that into a basic body.  We used sticks for the legs and attached it all together with plastic ties. (It got a head later.)

At that point it was time to bring it into the garage to start working on its "skin."  We used those packing papers (newspaper sheets) and a paper mache mixture to spread the sheets over the wires.

ED and DD worked with me every step of the way.  LD was quicker to lose interest in the paper-mache phase as he has never liked getting his hands "yucky" (even when he was a tot).

Here trash-o-saurus got meaty legs (wrapping bunches of paper around the sticks and keeping them on with duct tape.

On this day, trashosaurus got a styrofoam head which we attached and covered with more paper mache.

Posing with our finished dinosaur!

We worked on this project for two weeks about every other day. Obviously, I played a huge role in the momentum of this project, but boy do we ALL feel happy about the results. (Though LD made me chuckle when he asked, "Can we have some people over to see it? [a pause] But not kids, they'd just look at it and wouldn't be as interested in it as adults would." ... "You know it's like me, I just look at things and then walk on because I would rather play." (Hmmm... I guess we need to go to more art museums or something?!)

Have you made a trash-o-saurus? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below!
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You might be interested in our 60 page Dinosaur Packet with activities for 3-7 year olds.

Dinosaur Body Structure Activity -- Marshmellows, Straws and Skewers

We came across a wonderful idea here to learn more about body structure and how dinosaurs had to be perfectly balanced to stand and move.  I read the paragraphs about the importance of balance and had the kids balance a ruler on their fingers and then add a light head and a heavy head (the heavy head made the ruler tip over and you can see the "head" falling off.  They roared at that!!)

From there we went on to do the marshmellow activity.  Of course, anything involving something so yummy is sure to be a hit, but believe it or not, they really learned a lot about how difficult it was to balance the head with the body.  And we all worked together to build a T-Rex... the kids understand how truly important the dinosaur tail was in achieving balance.

This is DD's Marshmellow Dinosaur

Here is LD's dinosaur

And in the end we were able to make a T-Rex of sorts!!

Measuring Dinosaurs Activity

We looked up the length of several well-known dinosaurs, grabbed our plastic models and then went outside to see how long they really were. We chose
stegosaurus 30 feet
T-Rex 40 feet
apatosaurus 90 feet
We looked at how long one foot was (we hadn't done measuring in feet before as we've used the metric system up until now) -- and then measured out the dinosaurs' lengths using a 20 foot piece of ribbon (though in the picture to the left, LD was using a one-foot piece to estimate where 30 feet was -- he came very, very close!).

That's a long way back to the tip of it's tail (at the bottom of the driveway!)

Dinosaur Fossils Impression Activity

At the beginning of our activity we looked at this real fern fossil (from Pennsylvania). We talked about how ferns have been around for millions of years and fossil records indicate they were around well before dinosaurs (we referred back to the chart we have on "what came first" from a previous day.)  Then we went into our woods and looked for different kinds of ferns for making our own fossil imprints.

We gathered our ferns and looked closely to see which one looked most like the shale fossil we had.

Using this cute coffee-clay recipe (below), we made impressions.  After a lot of tries, the kids decided ferns just didn't make a very good impression.  We talked about how conditions really had to be right for a fossil to be made.

Then we went on to make dinosaur tracks and trilobite impressions (I bought a plastic trilobite at the LaBrea Tar Pits in Los Angeles earlier this summer.)  Of course I pointed out to the kids that trilobites and dinosaurs were not around at the same time (and once again we looked at the chart of "what came first.") ED especially enjoyed this activity and spent well over an hour making dinosaur tracks again and again!

Lots of people probably know about this "rock" clay recipe which is great for making fossils, but it's worth sharing again here:
1/2 cup salt
1 cup flour
1/2 cup coffee
1 cup used coffee grounds
(I drank all my coffee that morning, so instead I put some coffee into a pot on the stove, brought it to a boil, let it cool a bit then added salt and flour.  I didn't follow the recipe exactly as written.)

Since we now live in a more humid area, I opted to bake our fossils slowly at 325 for 45-60 mins since we have it hanging around while we do our dinosaur unit. (But warning--it's smelly!!)

Lots of Dino Puzzles

In the past couple of weeks we read lots and lots of books about dinosaurs and have pulled out lots of different puzzles.

LD got this for his birthday a couple of years ago and it was just perfect to pull out for this unit!

Geologic Time Line Activity

The Montessori teaching albums have an exercise called the "Clock of Eras." I felt that would not work as well for our family as DD really doesn't "get" the idea of a clock fully.  I didn't think it would really teach them the enormity of time as well as a long set of ribbons would... so instead I used the proportions of the clock and made a very long geologic ribbon (it's almost 60 feet in length):

I used red for the Hadean Era (a time of flaming gasses, volcanoes, etc.) -- 9ft 4 inches
I used sage green for the Archaean Era (a time of great rains, poisonous oceans) -- 17 feet 4 inches
I used yellow for the Proterozoic Era (a time when cyanobacteria and the sun worked together to put oxygen into the atmosphere) -- 26 feet
I used blue for the Paleozoic Era (a time when most life lived in the seas to protect it from harmful rays of the sun) -- 3 feet 9 inches
I used gold for the Mesozoic Era (a time of the great reptiles, among other life) -- 2 feet 5 inches
I used green for the Cenozoic Era (a time  with plants, animals birds, humans) -- 10 inches

As you can see in the picture above we used various "props" to put onto our timeline.  I had made some things out of cornstarch clay earlier this summer (a small volcano, pretend fossils,etc as I didn't know if we'd have our stuff) -- we also had a plastic dinosaur, plastic mammals and a pretend human (Strawberry Shortcake!) for the very end of the timeline.

Another time we did an activity What Came First? I wrote out index cards and let LD try to put them into the correct order.  The cards included things like
bacteria
green algae
jellyfish
trilobites
sharks
spiders ferns
the first mammals
the first birds
ants
Triceratops
camel
grass

In the picture below, LD is putting things in their proper order (according the UCBerkley website)On the left in the photo I wrote out the chart from the website out by hand as a reference. I found it amazing is that grass came into the fossil record *after* camels (ants, dinosaurs and so forth).

The kids loved when we stretched the timeline through the house and they had to put things in the proper Era (the volcano, dinosaur, plastic wooly mammoth, etc.)

If you want to go even farther with your studies of the geologic eras, these Montessori teachers posted wonderful lesson plans on all of the various eras. We didn't delve into their lessons as I had been promising DD a big unit on dinosaurs all summer as we traveled around and we've moved on to that.  We've done lots of hands on dinosaur activities... so stay tuned if you're interested in those! (Oh, and if you and your kids are inspired, you might try making a "trash-o-saurus" and link in with us at the end of this week! I thought that was such a fabulous idea and we've been working on ours for about 10 days now!!)

The Purple Strip

For those of you who know much about Montessori, you'll recognize "The Black Strip." This is an impressionistic activity that is meant to impress kids with the enormity of time on earth.  Our version was the purple ribbon strip -- and it is only 21 feet (as my ribbon ream was 7 yards!).  But it still shows how very little time we humans have been on earth.  I'm showing you a picture of our long ribbon (that includes all of "human history" in a mere 1/2 inch)... Of course, this worked best when I snaked it through the house and we had to RUN RUN RUN to the human portion of our timeline!! I can still hear the giggles that echoed through the house!

I promised hubby I'd be just a few minutes, so I'm going to save our actual geologic timeline and activities for another post tomorrow.

Oh--and changing subjects drastically -- today I finally created our compost pile and laid a short path to get to it.  Hooray!  As always my Dad was an amazing source of information about gardening.  And armed with more information from my Dad,  I just ordered 10 blueberry bushes which will be sent when the planting season is right (about two weeks from now). [In the US, you can order them from burpee.com.]  I've dreamed of having blueberry bushes again for years as I grew up with a lovely garden of blueberries (thanks Dad/Grandpa!!).  Yum!!

Timelines

Montessori uses five "Great Lessons" as an introduction to all topics.  It provides children with a big picture to demonstrate how sciences, art, history, language and geography are interrelated.  This idea resonates well with our learning style.  We did our own version of the first Great Lesson last year and LD still talks about it (and the science experiments and activities that followed).

This year we're off to explore the Second Great Lesson, which is essentially an introduction to geologic time -- the earth's timeline of events.  If you've read our blog, you'll see this also fits in well as we've been lucky enough to find fossils both in Australia and in Missouri in the past six months or so.  Also, we hadn't ever studied dinosaurs and that was one thing DD was particularly interested in studying this year.

To introduce the idea of timelines, we started small and have worked our way to the BIG earth timeline.

We did these activities over the course of a week or so:

1) I wrote out index cards with events in our daily life (get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, play/do school activities, lunch... etc.) LD had to read them and put them in order with the first event at the top and the last event at the bottom.

2) LD's Timeline: We talked about the fact that timelines can keep track of the events/progress of our individual lives.

We brought out the chicken embryo activity and put those in the proper chronological order. Then we read through the cards with events I had chosen from LD's own life.

LD was an IVF baby (as was DD, but ED was not--surprise!)... so we talked about the fact that we have pictures of him even at 8 cells, 8 wks, 12, 18, 36 and 37wks.  Anyway, then we read through some other highlights -- being born, first tooth learning to talk, his first word (you get the idea).  We mixed up the cards and he had to figure out his own life timeline.

I have to say that this was a lovely, lovely day with a lot of good talking and bonding!

3) Our family timeline:  Our third timeline exercise was our family history -- which went back to Grandpa being born, grandpa learning to walk, grandpa learning to design airplane engines, Grandma writing a successful book... Daddy becoming an Eagle scout, Mom joining the Peace Corps and teaching in Hungary... all the way through ED learning to walk.  There were lots and lots of family cards (vacations, big moments in our lives) and again it was lovely just talking through some of those events.

I thought it was quite funny when LD took the "Grandpa was born" card and ran across the room saying "That was a LOOOooooooooong time ago!" as he put it next to the wall!

4) The Earth's Timeline:  I'll save this for the next post as I'm out of time for now.

Want to make a "TRASH-O-SAURUS"??!!

I lost my internet connection this week.  That's a total bummer since writing on the blog is a major outlet for me since we're so new to the area (and I know very few people yet). The kids and I had busy, fun week and I hope to start sharing some of our activities later this weekend. We've been working on our timeline unit (I'll explain more soon, though a large portion of that entails the geologic time line... fossils, dinosaurs and such).

Anyway, back to the title of this post... we've been busy making a "trash-o-saurus."  I saw the idea/name somewhere on the web and loved the concept.  So now we're in the process of making our own "trash-o-saurus." We've been fairly true to the name and the only non-rubbish we've used are plastic ties and duct tape (oh, and flour!).  If this would be fun for you and your kid/s -- join us in a week or so when we share our photos by adding a link to your website in the comments area. (I'm not too savy about mr-linky, but might look into doing something like that if others are interested and if there's not too much of a learning curve on how to set that up.) And to be open and honest -- ours is a family project with lots (and lots) of Mom-involvement as you'll soon see! 

Hope someone else finds this idea fun and inspiring (if not now -- at some point down the road!!).