Plenty Valley Montessori School

A Cycle Two Classroom In Action.....Children work in different areas of the curriculum

"Here is an essential principle of education: to teach details is to bring confusion; to establish the relationship between things is to bring knowledge."

Maria Montessori
From Childhood to Adolescence

Montessori uses the 6-12 year old child's great drivers, the reasoning mind and the imagination which are focussed through the Great Stories (or Lessons). The first Great Story is The Creation of the Universe. The big picture keys present many possible points of interest as can be seen in the following pictures.

The First Great Lesson lead to the exploration of space for some children. Here children interpret the story through illustrations

.....and watch a volcano erupt.

Children research facts and information for their projects using books

A child completes his First Atlas, which is a combination of map work consisting of all the continents which have been traced, coloured and labelled accordingly

Pin maps are very popular. Here the children work with the pin map of Europe.

Using the Decimal Fraction Board for the use of decimal operations

The Concentric Figures. Creating various designs and patterns

The Constructive Blue Triangles- exploring the congruency and similarity using the triangles

Completing the No. 6 skip chain. Children skip count placing the number arrows accordingly.

Learning to use the small bead frame for the understanding of the decimal system

The Grammar Boxes.. grammar symbols are assigned to various sentences

Friends work together using the Stamp Games maths activity to practise addition and subtraction sums

Trilobites

Cephalopods

In the study of the Timeline of Life, students learnt about the development of various life forms. Some of the ancient life was made up of animals without backbones called invertebrates, and the most highly developed of these ancient animals were the Trilobites which ruled the seas for a hundred million years. These were followed by the Cephalopods. The name "Cephalopod" means "having feet on the head". The children created their own 3D version of these creatures.

Left: As part of our Timeline of Life activities, we made a reptile known as Kronosaurus - the largest known reptile of the seas. It was fourteen metres long and lived 80 million years ago.