Cultural

This area of study provides children with a first exposure to infinite and inspiring world of diversity, the many wonders of the world, its people, history, culture, music and arts. This section includes Geography, History and Science:

• Geography: here, your child is exposed to different countries, their customs, foods, clothes and habitats. She will learn to view herself as a citizen of the world. Children are taught about the solar system, volcanoes, land forms, etc.
• History: Children find it very easy to understand a new concept when it begins with something that they already recognize. The exploration of the passing of time begins with a child’s own life, talking about his/her birth, accomplishments and daily life, and making time lines with beautiful pictures of growing older. Later this method is used to study the story of our world and its ever-changing physical and cultural attributes.
• Science: this portion of the curriculum involves the exploration of the diversity of the living world as well as the physical one. A stream of experiments discussed in a group is set up. Dr. Montessori constantly emphasized the importance of learning through immediate interaction with the environment. She insisted that Early Learners NEEDED to MOVE and TOUCH in order to truly learn ANYTHING. Here, they certainly get to wonder, discuss hypotheses, set up experiments, and make observations and conclusions like real mini scientists.

They (children of the first plane) have already absorbed the immediate environment and the restricted society they and their families have dealings with. You must try to give the child what he now longs for: the understanding of the world, how it functions and how it affects the life and behavior of humanity.” (Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential.)

Dr. Montessori went a step further and said that, in order to truly prepare children to live in the world, we need to prepare them for the future as well. So important was this vision of the future that Montessori created her cosmic curriculum with the idea that only through children was there hope.

Montessori believed that by teaching children to recognize the interdependence of all living things, she would help them develop consciousness of their place on earth. With the idea that the Great Story, from which her Great Lessons are conceived, is not yet fished, Montessori portrayed humans as coming into a new era: the Ecozoic Era. Coined by Thomas Berry, the Ecozoic Era is the idea of a time when humans live in unity with one another and tend to their cosmic task of earthly stewardship.

“Education should not limit itself to seeking new methods for a mostly arid transmission of knowledge: its aim must be to give the necessary aid to human development…. If ‘the formation of man’ becomes the basis of education, then the coordination of all schools from infancy to maturity, from nursery to university, arises as a first necessity: for man is a unity, an individuality that passes through interdependent phases of development. Each preceding phase prepares the one that follows, forms its base, nurtures the energies that urge towards the succeeding period of life.” (From Childhood to Adolescence, p. 84)