Linking the Great Stories and Writing in Public Montessori
The Montessori Great Stories are at the heart of Cosmic Education for children aged 6–12, but what happens when the children in your Montessori elementary classroom are not yet fluent readers and writers?
Many Montessori Great Story follow-up activities assume children can independently read research cards, work with three-part cards, complete experiments and record their own ideas. In reality, many Montessori teachers and homeschool families are working with early readers, developing writers, neurodivergent learners and children who still need explicit literacy support.
That does not mean they need to miss out on the wonder of the First Great Story.
With carefully chosen Montessori First Great Story writing activities, shared writing, guided writing and accessible prompts, children can still build vocabulary, develop reading and writing skills and engage deeply with the story of the universe.
The Great Stories are designed to ignite the imagination for the 6-12 year old. Theoretically, on entering our 6-12 class a child is a fluent reader, or near to a fluent reader, so we can get straight into independent research, the child can have lessons on 3 part cards or read the experiment cards ...... wrong.....
Due to a variety of reasons many of us have early readers and writers in our classrooms. We also face the challenge of trying to meet state or national benchmarks.
I've made this collection of story starters for early readers and writers.
I find doing guided or shared writing very beneficial in increasing children's vocabulary, writing ability and reading skills.
Shared writing is where you, the teacher, write a text for students as a model of what a piece of writing looks like. Ideally, you target your finished piece of writing to slightly above the level of the children involved for example if children were using just initial letters to write a story you would model how to write medial and final sounds.
You may find this website helpful. It explains the type of teaching that helps children in early literacy.
These instructional strategies are effective in different ways for different purposes but a good teacher uses a variety :)
- Modelling
- Prompting
- Questioning
- Giving Feedback
- Telling
- Explaining
- Directing
This pack of story starters can be used for the First Great Story. I suggest you model a piece of writing first and then give students the sheet and have them write a story about the given topic.
It includes 15 different story starters or prompts like this one:
You may also be interested in these Great Story Blog Posts:
The Montessori Great Stories 101