I'm going to confess. The fourth and fifth Great Montessori Stories are not some of my favourites. In fact, there have been times when I have outright avoided them.
The rhythm of my classroom this year has led to me delivering the Fourth Great Story. However, with a roll made up of 90% neurodivergent and disabled students, the way I delivered this and came to deliver this is somewhat different from how traditional tellings of the story happen.
Firstly, I 'front-end' loaded the vocabulary and foreshadowed the story. I read to the children a very small portion from the DK book 'In the Beginning, the Nearly Complete History of Almost Everything' by Delf and Platt. This is a great book for neurodivergent children as it has a high number of pictures with captions under each picture so the child can track what the text is about. The book covers a huge variety of concepts in 2 page spreads. We turned to the page on Writing:
The sections we read looked at:
- The history of cave paintings (the bit about some cave paintings being designed with urine was a hit!)
- Pictograms
- Egyptian hieroglyphics
- Papyrus
- Cuneiform
- The evolving alphabet
- Writing before the pencil
- The invention of paper
- Chinese calligraphy
- The Madrid Codex
I read each of the sections several times to help with comprehension and included the 'start-stop' method. The start-stop teaching method is exactly what it sounds like: you read a portion and stop to check that the child has understood what the text is about. In my case, I stop several times during reading. Whilst reading, I also highlighted the cosmic work of the Chinese and pointed out that all their discoveries and work happened a long time before the European invention of the printing press. Such discussions are important as many history books are written from a European perspective that can perpetuate ideas of European superiority.
I then asked the children to write what I had been talking about in their own words. One child wrote about the Battle of the Alamo as that part of history had letters exchanged. Most of the others wrote about the text I had read to them. The book I had read from was open for them to refer to. After writing, the children all read their stories out loud and took turns offering affirmations to the writer about what they had written.
As this had been a lot of difficult, concentrated work, I then offered two follow-up activities to choose from. One was practising writing Chinese characters and drawing how they had changed over time. The other option, which proved more popular, was clay. I again gave the children the book and asked them to show in some way what they had learned. For some children, the opportunity to be with clay turned into a more therapeutic exercise where they rolled the clay around in their hands. Other children practised 'writing' messages in the clay, while still others made people from the times of early humans.
Children were given pictures of different Chinese Characters and drew them
Tamariki responded to the story with clay.
Later that day, I did the official fourth Great Story, offering the students that many of the words they were about to hear from this ‘very special story, told all over the world to children just like them in schools like theirs’ were words they had heard earlier in the morning and written about.
The Fourth Great Story - This is a script with slide show that can be used on computer or printed off to use as props.
Our telling of the story had many interjections and contributions from students and took several tangents, as is to be expected with incredibly neurodivergent brains, and diverged at the end into a large-scale discussion about how some cultures thought that only men should be literate. It was agreed that all people, regardless of gender, are intelligent and should have literacy education, with one child even bringing Taylor Swift into the discussion as proof of the intelligence of women!
We have followed up by looking at some more of the timeline in the above book, looking at moveable type and copying machines, as well as using some three-part cards which have included looking at Braille and Assistive Technology. One of our favourite things was to look at a clip from ‘Horrible Histories’ which is a song where the Egyptian children are learning to read words using hieroglyphics.
We have followed up this learning later in the week with children looking at the evolution of letters over time and practising writing these in their books.
Another follow up idea we will be using are these choice boards which have a variety of different ideas that encourage divergent and creative thinking.