Taxonomy and the Animal Kingdom: Arthropods- Part Five

"The new woman, like the butterfly come forth from the chrysalis, shall be liberated from all those attributes which once made her desirable to man only as the source of material blessings of existence. She shall be, like man, an individual, a free human being, a social worker...She shall wish to be loved for herself and not as a giver of comfort and repose. She shall wish a love free from every form of servile labor. The goal of human love is not the egotistical end of ensuring its own satisfaction- it is the sublime goal of multiplying the forces of the free spirit, making it almost Divine, and, within such beauty and light, perpetuating the species."

-Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method

This afternoon, the children convened in the yard to release the Painted Lady Butterflies they reared from microscopic butterfly eggs into beautiful adults. Although they were visibly stirred by the sunlight and fresh air, the butterflies choose to cooperate with our plan of allowing each child to carefully remove one from the cage and hold it on their palm for a few seconds before watching it flutter away into the warm spring breeze.

Taxonomy and the Animal Kingdom: Arthropods- Part Four

"Now let us imagine a man appointed to a chair of science in some university, with the task before him of doing further original work with the hymenoptera. Let us suppose that, arrived at his post, he is shown a glass covered case containing a number of beautiful butterflies, mounted by means of pins, their outspread wings motionless. The student will say that this is some child's play, not material for scientific study, that these specimens in the box are more fitly a part of the game which the little boys play, chasing butterflies and catching them in a net. With such material as this the experimental scientist can do nothing.

The situation would be very much the same if we should place a teacher who, according to our conception of the term, is scientifically prepared, in one of the traditional public schools where the children are repressed in the spontaneous expression of their personality until they are almost like dead beings. In such a school the children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk, spreading the useless wings of barren and meaningless knowledge which they have acquired."

-Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method

Over the weekend, the first of the Painted Lady Butterflies that the class raised from butterfly eggs emerged from its chrysalis. The children stood spellbound over the course of the day as the remaining five climbed out of their papery cases, their wrinkled wings still damp with meconium, unfurled their proboscis, and sat silently in the sunlight.

After the butterflies had a rest, the children sat quietly and peacefully (so as not to frighten them) and allowed the delicate insects to crawl across the palms of their hands.

Taxonomy and the Animal Kingdom: Annelids and Vermicomposting: Part 2

"It may be doubted whether there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures."

- Charles Darwin, 1881

Montessori guides consider a presentation to have been a "good match" when the child chooses to repeat the activity independently. Using that as my criteria, the presentation on earthworms in the garden was very well received. Not a day has passed without children racing out to the digging plot in the garden in the hopes of discovering worms, or inquiring of me "Don't you want to dig for worms in the garden?" (which translates into "Please use the pitchfork to turn over some dirt for me").

The children are equally excited about plucking wriggling worms from the vermicompost bin and feeding the worms lunch or snack scraps has become a highly coveted task.

Our unit on Annelids concluded with the children playing some line games in which they imitated worms, a demonstration in which they created a model of a gizzard using pebbles and a plastic bag,

by making and illustrating booklets showing the anatomy of an earthworm,

making worms out of playdo, by enjoying some earthworm non-fiction,
and with independent lessons in which the children matched Annelid cards or sorted different species of earthworms into anecic and epigeic worms.

If studying the diversity of earthworm species doesn't sound that exciting to you (I admit, it initially didn't to me), try imagining Driloleirus Americanus (the Giant Palouse Earthworm). It is an albino worm that lives in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and grows to be a meter long. It burrows more than five feet below the ground, gives off a scent similar to that of lily flowers, can spit in self defense, is too fragile to be handled by humans, and is extremely sensitive to ground vibrations (making it very hard to catch). In fact, there have only been four confirmed sightings in the last 30 years! The soil is a more interesting place than I ever imagined!



In addition to introducing children to the earth sciences and helping to orient them in the world, these activities expose them to the basic of scientific classification, scientific nomenclature, the principles of basic anatomy, and provide additional motives for children to develop their powers of observation and description, conceptual matching (a pre-reading skill), and language arts activities (reading and working on pencil control and handwriting).

Finally, it is really amazing to see how much less waste (particularly food waste) we have at the end of the day; between the vermicomposting and the thermophilic composting, we are well on our way to our goal of achieving zero waste lunches!

*If there are any other Montessori teachers reading this, I would highly recommend including this unit for your primary class. Unfortunately, the main manufacturers of three part taxonomy cards, Maitri and In-Print, don't have an annelid set (I emailed Julia Volkman in the hopes that they were planning to create some soon); in the meantime, if you would like to use the ones I made, send me an email. I am happy to share the cards and the lesson plans (our cards use the Getty Dubay font, as that is what we use in the classroom, so they should be easy for children learning both print and cursive to read).