Children of the Universe

If you haven't heard from me lately that's because I have been trekking all over the internet trying desperately to find out more about the montessori "cosmic" curriculum.

All I could find were vague generalities about it how it was a chronological elementary study cycle which began at Creation/Big Bang, and segued from astronomy to physics to geology, archeology & geography into biology and ultimately history. I kept reading allusions to the "5 great lessons" but I was having a terrible time trying to figure out exactly what the heck those were, and how they were taught.

I finally found a (kooky new-age) website called "We are all made of Stardust" which was some sort of freaky montessori cult run by a catholic priest and a pagan lady (at least that's what they looked like from the photos) who tour the country speaking at "schools and open-minded churches".

It reminded me a little bit of all that scary psudo-religion you see when you scratch the surface of those "Waldorf" schools. The site did had some interesting skit scripts for a small group of children and an adult to act out with interesting topics of the topics like the life cycles of stars or extinct animals (and not the common ones either). It was interesting, but not what I was looking for. I was looking for a lot less "ritual" and a lot more structure (and science).

10,000 websites later and still no luck.

Finally I stumbled upon a review of a book called Children of the Universe , which seemed to be exactly what I needed.

I promptly ordered ordered it direct from parent-child press, and paid full-price. This should tell you just how desperately I wanted to read it. I can't even remember the last time I paid full price for a book. It must have been before I discovered Amazon.com and Booksamillion, and I can't for the life of me remember a time without them.

Anyway...

It much closer to what I was looking for, although not perfect.

After reading I was still left with many lingering questions, but it wasn't a total waste of money, since for each of the "great lessons" the book included a narrative and suggestions for visual aids and demonstrations showing how the montessori teacher might introduce the lesson. These were a nice blend of non-denominational spiritualism and hard science, and even better they tied the whole of what I was trying to accomplish together in a nice psudo-spinal way.

So my curriculum is starting to get some structure at last.

Each unit will begin with the script/demo and end with a local field trip, and in between we will have that same chronological combination of shared reading, independent reading, narrations, memory work, and hands-on activities that I so love about SOTW.

The topics covered in the book are

Cosmic Education: What it is and Why we teach it
Evolution and Cosmic Education
Cosmic Education and the Cultural Curriculum
The Story of the Universe
The Story of the Solar System
The Story of the Earth
The Story of Life
The Story of Humans
The Story of Civilizations
Cosmic Education and the Future
Appendix 1 - Scope and Sequence
Appendix 2 - Classroom Resources
Glossary
References

But I only plan to take it to the end of Story of Humans and then next year begin SOTW 1 with him.

The tail end of the book was a collosal waste of time. The scope and sequence in appendix 1 didn't make much sense to me, it took a nice, logical, linear progression and jumbled it up over haphazardly over several years. And the resources were too few, and too outdated. Like I said, the best part of the book are the scripts.

It also lacked a certain amount of depth of coverage of the curriculum that I have come to hope for (and find lacking) in most curriculum books since reading TWTM. Few resources live up to that standard, unfortunately.

I really wish there was a WTM-style book which covered this, but for now I will have to make it up as I go along.

It seems so hard to me, but really all I am doing is compiling a massivly organized year-long unit study. Or a series of unit-studies. A long series of massively organized unit studies. A really long series of...


~EH