The Montessori Great Stories

You may have heard your #Montessorikids talking about the ‘Great Stories’ or the ‘Montessori Great Lessons/ Fables’ and wondered what these stories were.  Why are they called  ‘great’ and what is their purpose?

To summarise, there are five Great Montessori Stories.  These were created by Dr. Montessori to form the basis of the Montessori curriculum and the starting point of all classroom learning.  The Great Stories are woven with colourful language and metaphors so that the ‘child is given everything to explore’ in stories that ‘inspire and ignite’ the imagination. The Teacher’s job is to sow curiosity into inquisitive minds using the craft of storytelling based on truth.  The stories integrate the vastness of space, the timelines of prehistory including man’s presence, and the fascination of communication and numbers in a unique way. The Great Stories collate  all of our present day traditional subjects such as Geography, History, Biology, Language, Arithmetic and Geometry.

The Five Great Montessori Stories

The 5 great lessons are:

1. The Coming of the Universe and Earth – also called the Cosmic Fable
2. The Coming of Life
3. The River of Life
4. Communication of Signs
5. The Story of Numbers

As a creative and inspiring example, last month, our Cycle 3 classes gathered to hear about the ‘Cosmic Tale’.  This Great Story tells about the bigness of space, with no beginning or end. The students learned about how tiny, moving particles invisible to the eye appeared in the middle of the darkness.  As these particles collided in the darkness, they caused a great explosion and filled the darkness with a light. They heard that particles fused and clumped together to form the Stars and Planets, one of which is the Sun. Students discovered that there are so many stars in the universe that scientists have calculated that if a star was a grain of sand, all of the stars would cover the whole of Australia to a height of 200 meters. Included in the story were facts about the Earth’s relation to the Sun and the rules of physics which must be followed; some of which are still undiscovered.

This is just one example of how fascinating the Montessori Great Stories are and what  your #montessorikids are guided by in the richness of these fables. It also gives us and insight into the wisdom and intelligence of the great Dr. Maria Montessori.  These are stories that bring the understanding of science to a learner’s level.

We would love to tell you more about these Montessori Great Stories, and we have made it a topic of our next Parent Forum taking place on March 24^th.

Please join Yvonne and ask some ‘great’ questions.