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The Third Great Lesson is fundamentally different from the Second Great Lesson. The Second Great Lesson is about the evolution of all life on Earth, it shows how life has adapted and changed over the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history. The Third Great Lesson is not about human evolution.
The Fundamental Needs lesson is given to first year students in the Montessori elementary classroom. It is the first chapter of work that the child engages with in the history curriculum after The Passage of Time and it is a leitmotif throughout the entire elementary history curriculum. The purpose of this lesson is to introduce…
The Long Black Strip is a Montessori material that is used to teach children about the age of the Earth and the relative shortness of human history. It is a long, black strip of fabric that is unrolled to represent the 4.6 billion years since Earth’s formation. A small, red strip at the end represents…
Preparing your science shelves can be a lot of work. I remember in my training that these chapters were some of the hardest just because experiments take so much effort to set up. I made this page to take away some of that difficulty for you. These are the science command cards I sell. As…
I was sent a great question on Instagram: Why do you use the Moveable Alphabet during “sound games?” In my training, I was told not to introduce the Moveable Alphabet until the child had mastered several of the Sandpaper Letters. This question is referring to the phonemic awareness, “sound games,” lessons I have in my…
One of the things I do as a materials creator is consider storage options as part of my initial design. I think about how the materials will be used my students and how much space I’m going to need. I designed these to work in hardware storage drawers, but there are other options! Before we…
This Montessori reading program is much more than a set of card materials. In my opinion, the program IS the book and the materials support the book. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 is theory and science, its what justifies my subtitle “Evidence-Based Reading Instruction for the Montessori Classroom.” I show the…
After my review of Reading Programs last month, I received several requests to compare my program to the others mentioned. That’s fair. My intention for the previous article was merely to explain why I didn’t use those programs, but I understand how an article like this one might help folks make their own assessments. Dwyer…
By the age of six, children know around 15,000 words; that’s the same number of words Shakespeare used in all of his collected works. Let’s take a moment to really appreciate this achievement. Each of these words is just a different combination of 44 individual sounds with such subtle differences as ‘pen’ and ‘pin’. The…
She cried a lot. Reading was a major struggle for this second grader. She would do just about anything to avoid reading. Whenever she was confronted with the written word, she would get upset, cry, and sometimes even throw a tantrum. At the beginning of each year, I give all of my students a DIBELS…
