Grades 1-3

Learning Key Skills and Building a Foundation of Observational Knowledge

To make sense of the world around them and their place in it, children need to gain an understanding of cultures past and present. This knowledge is obtained through the study of history and geography. In Lower Elementary (Grades 1-3), we build the fundamental skills and storehouse of factual knowledge our students will need to master history and geography in the higher grades. At the same time, we motivate our students to be curious about the different places and societies human beings have lived in during the past, and that exist today.

Our Cultural Studies program in Lower Elementary has four main goals:

• To master the fundamental skills needed to make sense of geography and history. From map reading to understanding a calendar, from reading historical timelines to using a compass: our students acquire a full range of essential skills without which it is impossible to study history or geography.
  
  
• To build a solid understanding of political geography and the geographical features of the earth. Every culture, historically and today, exists in a specific place. Our students need to understand how to locate the place geographically, and how to imagine its physical features, to ground their historical and geographical knowledge solidly in the facts.
  
  
• To develop a framework which helps them research, compare and understand cultures across time and place. We introduce our students to the concept of "fundamental human needs", which then serves as a classification device for them to compare historical and current cultures, and relate them to their own experiences.
  
  
• To build a rich observational base of knowledge of a wide range of human cultures. Using the framework of fundamental human needs, our students study and research a variety of current and past cultures. They ask questions such as "what did they eat?" and "how did they get around?"—and acquire a first-hand understanding of the differences and similarities of human living conditions across the ages and across the globe. This knowledge is the context upon which our Upper Elementary and Junior High/Middle School curriculum will build.

Understanding Historical Timelines and Comparing Cultures

Our Montessori history program invites students to explore how human beings have lived through the ages, and to relate their research to their own experiences today. We want to equip our students with the skills to study history, provide them with the right approach, and foster their curiosity to understand the people and worlds of the past.

• We encourage curiosity by telling the "Great Stories"—impressionistic descriptions of things like how human beings began to populate the world, and of how humans discovered written communications and mathematics. These stories are not meant to teach content—rather, they serve to sow questions in our students' minds, and encourage them to research and learn more. They also give structure to our students' further studies, by serving as broad-brush signposts for the major happenings throughout time.
  
  
• We teach sequentially, introducing fundamental skills first, and then teaching history using chronological timelines. First, we make sure our students have the basic skills to study history. We teach them how to read a calendar, for example, and make the long time periods of history graspable with various materials and stories. Most notably, Montessori's Great Stories provide an over-arching framework within which students can gradually acquire a sense of the order of historical events. We emphasize chronological awareness: while students can choose to study different cultures, we ensure they place each culture into the proper chronology of history. (This contrasts markedly with how history is taught in the public schools: there, students start mid-stream with California history in 4th grade, without ever having gotten any systematic perspective on the previous historical developments that led to the establishment of California.)

 

• We add a personal touch, by relating what students learn to their own experiences. As a student explores different historic cultures, she always compares how these ancient people satisfied their fundamental human needs with her own experiences. As we introduce students to historical timelines, we also have them develop timelines of their own immediate families.
  
  
• We don't memorize dry dates, but instead explore historical events actively. Students have choices about how they would like to investigate different cultures throughout history. Written reports, oral presentations complete with student-made posters and props, and biographical sketches of important historical figures are a few of the ways in which our students experience history—all while placing their topic of interest within its historical framework. The result is the natural internalization of important dates, events, and figures, without rote memorization of minutia.

Example: How the "Fundamental Needs of Humans" enable students to study history purposefully, and relate what they learn back to their own context.

We introduce our children to the age appropriate elements that characterize cultures—food, shelter, transportation, clothing, communication, spiritual needs such as art—through the charts of the Fundamental Needs of Human Beings. These charts depict, with beautiful pictures, the various things all people require in order to lead a fully human life. The pictures make the charts suitable for our younger students just entering the classroom at age 6. They call the child's attention to the fact that all humans share these needs, that she too has those needs, and that there are many different ways of satisfying them.

Our children learn about the fundamental human needs in their own lives first. We invite them to discuss how they satisfy their needs: what did they eat for breakfast (Cheerios: food)? What are they wearing to stay warm today (a sweater: clothing)? How did they get to school (by car: transportation)? We then introduce the chart, discuss the different types of needs, and label them. We invite the children to explore the needs in more detail. For example, they may clip pictures from magazines that show how people today satisfy these needs.

Once a child understands this framework of fundamental human needs, these charts provide her with an approach for studying a culture or group. Whether she studies the ancient cultures of Egypt or Greece, or explores modern Japan, a child in our classroom has a method: she starts her studies by determining how the people in the culture responded to their need for food, transportation, shelter and defense. As she develops more understanding of abstractions, she also explores their spiritual needs: What were their religious beliefs? What works of art have they left behind? This process gives her a developmentally appropriate essentialized understanding of the culture. When she has such an understanding of various cultures, this knowledge serves as the context and motivation for the sequential study of cause and effect in history that comes in 4th grade and beyond.

In this way, our children constantly encounter a common thread that links all human beings, past and present, while gaining an abundance of observational data which will inform their future systematic study of history, and economic and cultural geography.

Developing a Sound Fact Base About the Cultures and Places Around the World

At LePort, we hold that to understand the world, one must know its physical places. Geography is thus an important subject at LePort, one which we begin to study in Montessori preschool and continue studying all the way through 8th grade.

The Montessori elementary geography curriculum serves an important role in this program by transitioning students from concretes to abstractions. In our Montessori preschool program, students discovered globes and 2-dimensional, solid puzzle maps. In elementary, they learn to actually read maps, to use a compass, and to find places using compass directions and latitude/longitude grids. They also move from puzzle pieces to detailed pin maps of all the countries of the world, and learn about their capitals and flags. In preschool, students worked with clay models and water to identify geographical features such as lakes, bays, islands and peninsulas. In elementary, they use geographical feature cards, and learn about the major rivers, mountains and deserts of all the continents.

As students study the continents and their countries, they also research and discuss the cultural, physical and economic conditions of different places, and begin to relate them to each other. They discover that warm, arid areas like those around Orange County have specific agricultural products, housing, and requirements for clothing, and then compare these areas to what is found in moist, cooler areas, such as the Pacific Northwest of the US. They learn to observe and classify these differences, opening up their eyes to their own experiences. When our students have a chance to travel to different places with their families, parents routinely comment on how interested they are in their new environment. The Lower Elementary geography program sensitizes their minds to such differences in environment.

By the end of 3rd grade, students who have been with LePort since primary have a solid grasp of the political geography of the world, its major physical features, and a solid fact base about the range of human cultures that populate the earth. They have become worldly in the best sense—they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic observers of the world, and always eager to learn more about what they see.

Students Who Are "At Home" In The World

At LePort, we understand that children need to acquire knowledge in a cognitively appropriate sequence, so they can really understand, rather than memorize theoretical concepts by rote. Our Lower Elementary (Grades 1-3) cultural studies curriculum delivers on this approach. Our students master foundational skills, acquire observational knowledge about people throughout time and place, and develop a deeply personal interest in the world around them.

Our students:

• Have mastered key tools for really understanding social studies, including maps, concepts of time and long timelines, and have practiced applying them to learn about history and geography.
  
  
• Have internalized a framework for observing and comparing cultures across age and time. Equipped with a deep, applied understanding of the Fundamental Needs of Human Beings, they have a ready framework to study any current or past culture they encounter.
  
  
• Have discovered history as the intriguing study of human beings throughout the ages—beings like themselves, who found different ways to satisfy their needs. Our students understand that history began a very long time ago; that society as we know it now evolved slowly, and that history provides a wealth of fascinating stories that illuminate how we came to live the way we do today.
  
  
• Have acquired a storehouse of information about cultures throughout the ages—cultures that may range from Ancient Greece to Ancient China and Victorian England, depending on the child's own interests. When they encounter different cultures in their systematic study of history in Upper Elementary and Junior High (Grades 4-8), our Montessori graduates can compare and contrast cultures, and understand the process of evaluating them.
  
  
• Understand their place on planet earth. They have a solid understanding of the places of the world: after three years at LePort, our students can name and place most of the countries in the world, and for many regions and countries, they can describe their most prominent characteristics (physical features, climate, main industries, and cultural attributes).

Our Cultural Subjects curriculum is so fundamentally different from the standards of the California public schools that it is impossible to directly compare our students' achievements against those of their public school peers at similar grade levels. For example:

• Geography is not taught as a systematic subject in the public schools—not in Grades 1-3 nor at any later stage. It is always an adjunct to a social studies topic: US geography gets covered with US history, California geography with California history, and current European geography doesn't get mentioned until Grade 10 when they cover World History. We can therefore say that as far as geography is concerned, our 3rd graders know more than their public school peers in their freshmen year in high school!
  
  
• History is not taught chronologically until Grade 6 in California public schools. Instead, students study a disconnected list of "social studies" concepts, with a mix of useful and developmentally appropriate activities, such as compiling their own family history (2nd grade, also done at LePort Schools), with such out of context standards as expecting 3rd graders, without any previous exposure to history to "determine the reasons for rules, laws, and the U.S. Constitution; the role of citizenship in the promotion of rules and laws; and the consequences for people who violate rules and laws." Nothing but rote memorization is possible in such an assignment for students of this age—and so they are bound to be repulsed by history before they ever really study it. Contrast this to the approach at LePort: our 3rd graders do not discuss abstract concepts which are necessarily meaningless to them, given the status of their knowledge. Instead, they acquire a broad range of observational data across the chronology of human history in Lower Elementary (Grades 1-3), then pursue a systematic, chronological study of history in Upper Elementary and Junior High (Grades 4-8). The result is that by 7th grade, when they study the founding of our country, they have the vast historical context to understand the profundity of the accomplishment that is the United States Constitution!

LePort teaches history chronologically—and thus makes it comprehensible to students. It's such a contrast to the public schools, where they teach things haphazardly, and where students just don't get it. For example, when my older son was in 2nd grade, and February came along, they had Black History Month, and all of the sudden, they talked about Harriet Beecher Stove and Frederick Douglas. At age 7, without any context, my son and his friends had no idea why these people mattered: they had no concept of the Civil War, no understanding of slavery. Recently, my son recalled experiencing Black History month in elementary school: he was talking with a friend who was in his class then, and they told me about a game they used to play: at recess, they would sell each other to other people. They had learned that money could be made at slavery, and had made a game out of it. That's what you get when you teach history badly. At LePort, in contrast, they teach history chronologically, from the beginning, and they integrate it with art history and literature. My younger son, who was at LePort, really gets history. He doesn't just memorize the dates of the Renaissance, but he understands what it was, and what it meant. The strong knowledge of history carries over to other subjects. For example, it's much easier to make sense of Geometry, when you have studied ancient history."

Shanan C., LePort Parent, Mission Viejo