The Five Great Lessons
The Five Great Lessons
The Five Great Lessons
The Great Lessons are an important and unique part of the Montessori curriculum.
These lessons are bold, exciting, and are designed to awaken a child's imagination
and curiosity. The child should be struck with the wonder of creation, thrilled with new
ideas, and awed by the inventiveness and innovation that is part of the human spirit.
The Five Great Lessons are traditionally presented in lower elementary (grades 1-3),
and are presented every year so that children see them more than one time. Unlike the
3-6 environment, where the child is introduced first to "small" ideas that gradually
widen into larger concepts, the elementary child is introduced right away to large
concepts - the largest of all being the beginning of the universe. Then they can be
shown how all the smaller ideas fit into the larger framework.
Traditionally, there are Five Great Lessons that are used to paint a broad picture
before moving to more specific study. They consist of:
The First Great Lesson is the most memorable and is often done on the very first day
of school. It involves the use of a balloon and gold stars to tell the story of the begin-
ning of the universe. This lesson also includes some demonstrations using solids and
liquids to show how the continents and oceans first came together.
The Second Great Lesson involves the coming of life. This lesson revolves around the
Timeline of Life, a long chart with pictures and information about microorganisms,
plants, and animals that have lived (or now live) on the earth. The great diversity of life
is emphasized, and special care is paid to the "jobs" that each living thing does to con-
tribute to life on earth.
The next Great Lesson is the Coming of Human Beings. This lesson involves a time-
line with a tool and a human hand to talk about the three gifts that make humans
special: a mind to imagine, a hand to do work, and a heart that can love. This lesson
will lead children to study the beginning of civilizations and the needs of early humans.
• Reading: literature, poetry, non-fiction, myths and folk tales, authors, reading
comprehension, reading analysis, literary terms
• Writing: elements of style, function, voice, composition, letter writing, research,
study skills
• Language: origins of spoken language, foreign languages, history of languages,
speech, drama
• Structure: alphabets, bookmaking, grammar, punctuation, sentence analysis, word
study, figures of speech
The last of the lessons is the Fifth Great Lesson: The Story of Numbers, also called the
History of Mathematics. This lesson begins with the earliest civilizations, who often
only had "one", "two", and "more than two" as their numeric system. It continues with a
look at different numbering systems throughout the centuries, culminating in the
decimal system that we use today.
Clearly, these five stories encompass an enormous amount of information about the
origins of the world around us. When each story is shared, it should never be left alone
- there should always be further study open to the children so that the story becomes
the springboard but not the focus. The stories can be referred to throughout the year
when new topics are introduced, as a way of providing unity and cohesion to such a
wide variety of studies.
The best source of further information on the Great Lessons can be found online at
missbarbara.net/greatlessons.html. This is a website with tons of info on each of The
Great Lessons, created and run by Barbara Dubinsky. There you'll find detailed lesson
plans, background information, and classroom activities. This site uses slightly different
terminology for the names of the Great Lessons than I have used (there's some variety
within the Montessori method), but the concepts remain the same.
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