Our Cosmic Journey...

We ended the first week of school with the presentation of the First Great Lesson by our third years.  This has become a tradition in our class which the first and second years eagerly look forward to each year.  Last year, we had the fun idea of presenting the charts on our projector so they could be seen more easily.

The First Great Lesson is our springboard into lessons on space, stars, gravity, the Earth, rocks and minerals, volcanoes, mountains, the water cycle and more.  This year we also did some nebula art...

When do you present the First Great Lesson?  What special/different traditions have you added?

Kick It Up a Notch!

Extension work can be one of the more dynamic parts of a Montessori classroom.  A few years ago we started calling our extension work "Kick It Up a Notch" work in honor of those young inventors Phineas and Ferb.  It also exactly describes what the purpose of an extension of a lesson is- to take the vocabulary learned or the basic concept and to elaborate, take it further and add some critical thinking components to it.

This second year student is working on a Kick It card for the Mesozoic Era of the Timeline of Life.

I feel that the ideal is to always let the student choose what he/she wants to do to "kick it up a notch", but we have found that sometimes students avoid extension work because they can't think of what to do.  To help with this, we started making Kick It cards that we place with each lesson.  Each card has customized suggestions for extensions for that particular lesson.  We tell the students that these are just some ideas to get their juices flowing- we love it when they come up with their own extension ideas.