Hooray for Geography!

Dearest Guide,

One thing that my children miss the most about their Montessori classroom are the geography studies you do.  How do you go about that?  What is the order in which concepts are introduced?

Signed, Citizen of the World

Dear Citizen,

I am happy to tell you what we do in our Prepared Environment, but I must warn you, it's origins are now murky.  Having done this work in the classroom for over 30 years, I can no longer remember what was part of my training and what I gleaned at teachers' conferences over the years.  I do know that it was hugely influenced by the founder of Philomath Montessori School, Pauline Tanaka.  Pauline taught me how to organize a unit and create a schedule of geography studies over a 3 year cycle in a casa dei bambini. Ever grateful to you, Pauline!

In all Montessori studies, we begin with the whole and the explore the parts.  In learning about biology, we learn that things are either living or non-living.  We then get more specific.  Living things are either plants or animals (we delve into ambiguous fungi later). Let us now learn about one specific animal that the child is interested in and learn about the parts of its anatomy or it's life cycle. And our knowledge gets broader and yet more specific as we continue discovering.  Animals are either vertebrates or invertebrates.  Vertebrates are either mammals, fish, reptiles, birds or amphibians.  One could get more specific depending on interest.  One could divide one of those classes into orders, such as mammals into carnivores, insectivores, bats, primates, rodents, ungulates, etc. One could further divide one of those orders, say, carnivores, into families such as canidae, felidae and so on. 

Oops!   I digress, but it is interesting so I will not delete it.  So, following that same principal, in geography, we begin with the Earth.  The whole Earth in the form of a globe.  At school, we have two: one to show the distribution, in a tactile way, of land and water surface and one to show the continents and oceans.  Then we soon move to our first Puzzle Map, the World Puzzle Map, which allows one to remove and handle all of the continents. At home, it is a wonderful thing to have a globe or a map of the world on the wall to refer to.

Another principal of Montessori education is that we offer the child a sensorial experience first, before offering a language/vocabulary experience.  We allow the child to attach to the material and assimilate some of the ideas and concepts held within.  Now the child has some skin in the game.  This child may ask, "what is this?"  and show that they want to know the names of these continents.  So we teach them, over a length of time which, in my experience, differs VASTLY from child to child.  Please refer to the post from March 23,2020 "Adapting to New Times," which goes over how we teach vocabulary in a "3 Period Lesson."  Another fortunate aspect of Montessori education is the curriculum is laden with its own rewards.  In our classroom (every classroom is different), once a child knows the names of the continents, they may craft a lovely map of their own to take home either by tracing and drawing or by painstakingly perforating color-coded paper to tear out in the shape of the continents and adhering them to a large paper drawing of the two hemispheres.  Kids love that stuff!

Once the names of the continents are known, we move on to a more specific (remember that principal?) study of geography, the North America Puzzle Map.  Just to be clear, kids in South America start with their own home continent, Africans, Europeans, etc do likewise.  The child has a sensorial experience of this map now, which is divided into the countries that make up North America, from Greenland to Panama. Then we can learn the names of the countries.  Then we can study and learn to identify their flags. Now we can move onto a new continent.  Yep.  Happens just that fast. Wink.

I don't want this to be too long so, as concisely as possible, this is how I prepare for a unit of geographical study.  I choose a country of interest, preferably that has a holiday I want to celebrate happening around the time I want to do the unit.  Then I begin my research, learning some of the following: location, geography, climate, biomes, indigenous animals and plants, indigenous peoples and ancient civilizations, language, religion, etiquette and folk ways, traditional arts, crafts, music and cuisine, modes of transportation and communication, dress: both contemporary and traditional, historical events, the form of government, the current leader, poets, artists, authors, current events, crops, exports, imports.....Phew!  There may be more, but I am going by memory here. 

All or some of this is usually presented in the form of short true stories.  It is delivered in dribs and drabs, not wishing to try one's audience.  I will often show one or several still images on our electronic tablet.  I will show a lemur if I am telling about lemurs.  I try to show the whole creature or image.  Children are very literal and trusting.  Once, many years ago, some historical reeenactors came to teach my class about Lewis and Clark.  One artifact they showed was a bit of bear pelt about the size of your hand.  After they left, one of my kids said, "I thought they were much bigger." 

At school, I painstakingly teach myself to sing songs in languages I do not know by choosing the simplest one I can find on YouTube, searching for the lyrics and listening to it over and over, line by line, writing it down phonetically for myself.  Then I teach it to the kids by telling them the meaning of the song, then going over it line by line in a call and respond format, so that they can hear (my very best attempt at) the sounds to be reproduced.  Thereafter, I usually just start singing the song daily and they join in, more and more, as they are able.  We also learn phrases of the (usually official) language of the country.  We learn to count, perhaps say the names of colors or days of the week.  I have a fantasy of meeting someone from Indonesia or Mongolia and bonding hard because I can greet them in their language and sing their favorite song from childhood.

We do our Walking on the Line to music from the country we study and we dance to it as well.  We try to recreate a craft or art form.  We try to create a Practical Life activity for the study.  For example, if one were studying India around Divali time, one could make dayas (lamps) out of cotton and ghee.  If one were studying Peru, one could card fleece or wool and learn to weave. When studying the Anasazi of the Southwest US, one can make clay pots.  If one is studying South Africa, one could grind corn with a mortar and pestle or mechanical grinder after seeing an image of this being done with those huge stand-up varieties.  One can act out activities that are not part of one's own life.  A small group of kids and I acted out a communal grinding of grain, each taking their turn to raise their massive imaginary pestles to bring it down and crush our invisible grain without breaking our rhythm. Super, super fun.  Or we might act out the actions of a fox listening for a mouse in the snow and then pouncing, or a bower bird gathering decor for his nest, or a Yanomami poling a canoe down the Amazon, for example

We read books - books set in the country, scholarly books about the country (we often just show some pictures and disseminate brief stories orally at a level our preschoolers can appreciate and understand), books about immigrants from that country, about the indigenous species, an aspect of the daily life, and for our elders, our Full Day students, myths and legends that so capture the essence of the culture. 

We try to have a holiday as part of our unit of study and they are very simple celebrations.  My magic formula is this : Gather, sing your song, fly your flag, maybe read a good book that is set in the country. Eat a special snack that is of the country.  Dance to the music, possibly holding the mask or maraca or flag you made in the arts and crafts section of the study.  One of our families who is homeschooling likes to make a special meal featuring the cuisine of the country about which they are learning and play appropriately cultural music while dining.  How delightful.  That is all the celebration one needs, in my opinion.  Children are very easily satisfied by the most pared-down of festivities.  When we studied Jamaica, the highlight was cutting and eating a pineapple outdoors after we sang all our Harry Belafonte songs.  That's it!  And they loved it.  They probably came home talking about it.  No need to overdo.  Save something for their quinceaneras and bar mitzvahs, no?

Is that helpful, Gentle Parent, or have we moved into "sorry I asked" territory?  I do tend to run on, don't I?  And I am one of the less rabid Montessorians you are likely to meet!   On another note, Gentle Parents, we all learned yesterday that we will not be back in session this school year.  I know we are all very sorry about that and we must mourn that loss.  Some of your children will be especially sad and I encourage you not to distract them or dissuade them from their sadness.  This is a loss they can manage and this is a prime time, developmentally, to learn that we can withstand loss: that we are resilient and that grief is not a permanent feeling.  Let your child know that it is only proper that they should feel sad, if they do, and that this awful feeling will not last forever. Their response to this adversity (like everything they experience during the First Plane of Development) will become part of their core, their personality and the adult they are creating.  Missing all of our kids and their families,I remain,

Your Guide,
Doni