Cultural Learning in Montessori Classrooms
This article originally appeared in the New Kingsleyan, Spring 2018 issue
“Our work is not to teach, but to help the absorbent mind in its work of development. How marvelous it would be if by our help, if by an intelligent treatment of the child, if by understanding the needs of his physical life and by feeding his intellect, we could prolong the period of functioning of the absorbent mind!” –Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind
The Cultural Curriculum
As you enter any Kingsley classroom, you will likely experience the hum of a typical Montessori environment: students working independently and with their peers, teachers giving lessons to individuals and small groups, students moving freely through the space as they select work from the shelves. Upon looking more closely at the work the students are doing, you will notice not only that they are using different materials and completing separate works from one another, but also that they are practicing a variety of skills from different subject areas at the same time. One student might be counting beads for a math work, as the student next to him/her lays out a puzzle map of Africa, and another conducts an experiment about melting ice. You are witnessing the integration of the Cultural curriculum inside the classroom.
Montessori Methodology
The Montessori methodology is divided into three core subject areas: Language, Math, and Cultural. The Cultural curriculum refers to an integrated study that includes History, Biology, Geography, and Physical Science, as well as the Arts.
While Language and Math are major and essential components of the Montessori classroom, many traditional classrooms focus solely on Language and Math during the early years of a student’s education. In Montessori classrooms, Cultural lessons remain an equally important and vital part of the student’s day, throughout the age levels. Incorporating Cultural lessons into a student’s educational experience enables them to enrich their understanding of the world and their place in it.
Cultural Lessons
Giving students the Cultural lessons and skills needed to make discoveries about our world is responsive to their developmental curiosity and aided by their absorbent minds. By introducing lessons about the intricacies of our world early in their education, Kingsley students are exposed to concepts like political geography, Earth science, and engineering, and are able to speak to these concepts at a young age.
Students also begin to realize, at a young age, how interconnected these subjects are. In a Montessori classroom, students experience new ideas through hands-on learning and by using Montessori materials. These materials are designed for each developmental level and become more complex as the grades progress, so that a student revisits a concept many times, but through materials and lessons most appropriate to their current cognitive ability. This process, known as scaffolding, is a form of social learning where students are provided with the necessary support and guidance to progress from one level to the next.
Early Childhood Cultural Learning
The Montessori Cultural area at the Early Childhood level is broad in content, yet specific in its intention. It is through the Cultural curriculum that young children develop impressions about how the world works.
Sensory Years
The years between birth and age six are largely unconscious ones. At this time in their development, children sense and manipulate their surroundings, first with their mouths and then with their hands, in order to gain understanding. This period of development is considered “the sensory years,” when children absorb infinite amounts of information through their senses — sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste — and then internalize that information as deep sensory knowledge. Maria Montessori said that children in this age group have “absorbent minds,” because they seem to take in information effortlessly; these are the years when lasting impressions are made.
Cultural Curriculum
The Early Childhood Cultural curriculum encompasses geography, zoology, botany, physical science, and history. As an introduction to physical geography, two globes are used. One globe represents land and water areas, showing the land as rough brown sandpaper and the water as a smooth blue painted surface. The second globe introduces the seven continents — each is shown in its own distinct color. Children learn the names and location of each continent. The same colors of the continents carry over to the Puzzle Map of the World and into the continent materials used in Lower Elementary.
Geography
The large wooden Puzzle Maps are popular activities in the classroom. The child puts each puzzle piece into place by means of a little knob. The introductory map of the world has a separate puzzle piece for each continent. After working with the world map, the child can explore the six continent puzzle maps, in which each country is represented by a separate puzzle piece. There is also a map of the United States with a separate piece for each state. As they manipulate these puzzles, children learn about several countries located on each continent. Teachers provide objects, photos, culture-specific music, foods, and art activities that represent particular countries and cultures of study.
Zoology
To begin their exploration of zoology, children are introduced to the concept of living vs. nonliving. Teachers read books about and discuss the needs of living things: soil, air, and water, and often exhibit real objects that the children can hold and study. Children create categories using objects and photographs, dividing them into groups of living and nonliving things, plants and animals, vertebrates and invertebrates. Finally, the five vertebrate classes — fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal — are introduced. Children learn about the variety of animals in each group, their distinct features, the names of their body parts, and their habitats.
Botany
Botany is introduced using large knobbed puzzles of a tree, a leaf, and a flower that separate each part of the plant into a distinct puzzle piece. Children learn the names for each part of a tree, leaf, and flower. Working with these materials helps children to become more observant of the characteristics of things that grow in their own environments. We frequently have plants, flowers, or vegetables growing in the classroom.
Physical Science
Physical science is introduced by way of real things from nature displayed throughout the classroom. Children explore different kinds of rocks, shells, and other specimens using a magnifying glass. They conduct simple experiments to help them explore such concepts as “sink and float,” “magnetic and nonmagnetic,” “transparent and opaque,” and “solid, liquid, and gas.” A constantly rotating curriculum provides the opportunity for children to explore other areas, such as the solar system, volcanoes, and the weather.
History
History is introduced in a very personal way in Montessori classrooms. Each child is assigned a special day every year, close to or on his/ her birthday, for a Birthday Walk. This uniquely Montessori tradition allows children to enact the process of time by holding a globe while walking around a lit candle representing the sun. For each year of their age, children circle the sun. Afterward, they show the class photographs of themselves at each age. Teachers then display the photos in the classroom in a variety of ways, often showing the history of each child’s life by displaying them as a timeline on the classroom wall.
Culture
The Cultural curriculum introduces children to the physical world of plants and animals, the exploration of differences and similarities among people, and the opportunity to see, hear, taste, smell, and manipulate the real things that make up their unique cultural environment. While exploring the rich content of the Cultural area, young children are unconsciously building skills in observation, prediction, sequencing, categorizing, questioning, organizing, comparing, and contrasting. These developing skills will be used at the Elementary level when the Cultural curriculum becomes more abstract and subject to critical thinking. As is the case in all of the Montessori curriculum areas, the content is used as a means to develop thinking and learning skills.
Lower Elementary Cultural Learning
As anyone who knows an elementary student can attest, two of the most frequent questions that they ask are: why and how? “Why do the days get shorter in the fall?” “Why are whales mammals and not fish?” “Why are there so many different countries in the world?” “How big is the sun?”
The move from Preschool to Elementary indicates a remarkable shift in a student’s perspective of the world. During the first six years of life, a child is only aware of oneself and one’s immediate environment. As children enter the second plane of development and Elementary school, they begin to connect more meaningfully to society and expand their consciousness of the world beyond them.
Cultural Curriculum
Elementary students possess an inherent curiosity and imagination about the world and their place in it, and so the Elementary Cultural curriculum is designed to build off that natural wonder and excitement about the universe. Kingsley’s Lower Elementary Cultural curriculum invites students to ask why and how, and to discover the inner workings of the universe for themselves.
Culture as the Unifying Element
Students are first introduced to a new Cultural concept through lessons told as stories; impressionistic lessons designed to spark the student’s imagination and provide a concrete representation of the in-depth lessons to follow. This method connects with the student’s sense of wonder and attraction to narration, and the students begin to develop questions and ideas that draw them into the lesson. Teachers then refer back to those introductions as the unit of study continues.
For example, when introducing First Grade students to various land and water forms, instead of merely giving them a textbook filled with definitions, the teacher first tells a dramatic tale of how in the early days of the Earth there were no lakes or rivers until it rained for years. The water then filled in the dips and bumps of the land. While explaining this, the teacher sprinkles water slowly like rain onto a bumpy “landscape” of clay until the holes and cracks fill with little pools of water. The difference between land and water forms literally materialize in front of the students’ eyes, and they recall that visualization later during the more technical lessons on specific land and water forms.
The Great Lessons
The interconnectivity in the Lower Elementary Cultural curriculum illustrates one of the most exciting elements of the Montessori method. In fact, the Cultural curriculum is the unifying element of the
Montessori education in Lower Elementary, which is introduced through the five Great Lessons. These are presented to the students at the beginning of every year and provide the foundation for all other lessons taught during the Elementary period.
The Great Lessons are the Creation of the Universe, which tells the story of how our universe and planet came to be; the Coming of Life, which tells how living things evolved; the Coming of Humans, which explains how human beings possess gifts that set them apart from other animals; Communication in Signs, which tells how humans developed written language; and the Story of Numbers, which presents how humans invented math. These lessons, while presented simply and impressionistically enough for young students to grasp, are incredibly powerful. They connect with the student’s burgeoning curiosity about these topics and plant questions and ideas that will drive their studies throughout Elementary.
Upper Elementary Cultural Learning
In Upper Elementary, the focus of our Cultural curriculum is promoting the idea that students are members of a global community. The purpose of our lessons is to provide perspective that within our classroom and beyond the walls of Kingsley, there is a wide array of cultures that make up our world. As global citizens, we expect that our students will graduate from Kingsley with a mindset that allows them to see the world through multiple lenses and to be open to ideas different than their own. By the end of their Sixth Grade year, Kingsley students will have been exposed to the world from the perspective of a global citizen.
A Global Perspective
Through the study of local, national, and global geography, students seek to find connections between physical landmarks and resources available, and the cultural characteristics of the people living in that particular region. The Cultural themes within Upper Elementary vary greatly, from the study of early humans to that of our country’s electoral process, and students dive into these themes through self-directed inquiry, as well as through exposure to new concepts by their teachers.
In the spring, students in Upper Elementary continue to work on understanding how humans have evolved and migrated across the globe over thousands of years. Through this exploration, students seek to answer the question of where we as a species came from and how we have evolved and adapted to our environment. Creating and growing a civilization will be a focus, as students will look at components of how early humans worked as an organized unit to survive and thrive.
Culture throughout History
Beyond the study of early humans, students connect a mathematical component to their cultural work. A study of scale and proportion aims to give students a perspective on how recently modern humans evolved over the course of hominid history. Piecing together broken pots helps students gain a sense of how an archaeologist solves ancient artifact puzzles.
Students also participate in more local, civically-minded projects. During election cycles, students create pamphlets to hand out to the citizens of Boston explaining the importance of voting in our local, state, and national elections. Opportunities like these provide students a firm connection between the work they are doing in school and their local environment.
From evolution to mathematical components to voting, the Cultural studies in Upper Elementary aim to turn students into researchers; eager to ask and seek answers to questions about global topics.
Culture Across the Classes
Kingsley students have the privilege of exploring the Cultural subjects not only in the classroom, but also in their Co-Curricular classes. Through the Cultural curriculum, a student is encouraged to make connections between lessons and across subjects. For instance, a student might learn about the parts of an insect in their classroom’s Biology lesson, observe different types of insects in the science lab, and practice scientific illustrations of different insect species in their Visual Arts class.
This intersectional, “big picture” thinking is a hallmark of Montessori learning. Teachers collaborate in planning units of study to ensure that students have the opportunity to explore their Cultural lessons in a variety of environments.
