Cultivating Dharma

You will need to download and install Adobe’s AIR. It is free, quick and easy. Go to www.adobe.com and look for the “Get Adobe Air” button. Once you have installed AIR, then you can download and install the 100 Board application.

Download 100Board application here. [You may need to Right-Click and Save As. If your browser asks you if you want to "append" an extension, choose not to do so.] I’ve tested this on Mac OS X though it should run the same on Windows or Linux for that matter since it’s the AIR runtime that it doing the work.

I consider myself to be rather devoted to the teachings of Maria Montessori. I would like to think that I offer the students I work with an authentic Montessori experience regardless of the fact that our school is a public (charter) school. I have experienced very different reactions from many different Montessori teachers and administrators about the use of technology in the classroom. Some say that computers should be introduced much later - like high school. Others say perhaps upper elementary. And then there are those among us who would like to see computers disappear from our classrooms altogether.

Let me lay my cards on the table. I am very much in favor of technology’s presence in the classroom. However, as with anything else in the classroom, there are guidelines and expectations that are associated with it. And some of these expectations are expectations of me, the teacher, with regard to how I “prepare” the technological environment. There is something to be said about “research” that involves the student wandering around the internet in search of information about different topics. After all, one of the skills necessary for success in life is the ability to sift through mounds of information in search of the two or three bits that are actually relevant.

However, there is also a need, I believe, for a more structured use of computers in the classroom. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to use the computer as a “material” in the classroom associated with a certain number of “jobs”. To this end, I have begun writing programs that are virtual creations of traditional Montessori materials. This first one is a computer simulation of the 100 Board. The 100 Board is usually for children who are often considered to be rather young to use a computer. But I think if the expectations and guidelines of the job are clear enough, then it should not be impossible. And little children might really be proud of the fact that they successfully completed a job on the computer. The next one to be released is the Pythagoras Board. This will actually be useful for older students.

The use of the computer in this manner adds another step in the path to abstraction. As time permits, I plan to create versions of the Bead Frame, Multiplication Checkerboard, Sentence Analysis, etc. Please let me know what you think.

This Clock of Eras is without numbers so no presupposed time scale. Not having numbers is nice since you can be open to treating it as a twenty-four hour clock or a twelve hour clock. I prefer the twenty-four version of the story myself.

The blog now runs on updated software. The looks of it changed but all the same stuff is here. And more stuff will be added.

The other morning I was talking with another teacher in the classroom. She was preparing to show the students in the class (5th&6th grades) the hand-timeline. I wished her luck and told her to “open their minds”. She said she didn’t know and I think she was feeling a little less than absolutely confident about giving the lesson. One of the students was listening in and at that point said to the other teacher, “If you can open your mind, you can open ours.” How true I thought. And how amazing that this student just said it as if it were something to add to a list.

So it has begun. A third year. Last year, at a different school, we had thirty-seven children in the classroom and the year before that we had thirty-eight. This year, I have twenty-one. The positive difference cannot be stated emphatically enough. My posts this year will almost surely revolve around this difference.

Here are some sorting cards for parts of a sailboat. There is a version for 3-6 and for elementary.

Parts of a Sailboat - 3-6

Parts of a Sailboat - Elementary

Here is a timeline of of the history of scripts. I made it a couple of years ago during my Montessori training. It was a lot of fun to make. Like the Timeline of Humans (below in an earlier post), these are both large documents intended to be printed out on a two foot wide paper roll. This timeline of scripts is one-hundred inches long. You might wonder what good this would be to anyone without access to a large printer. And I tend to think that you would be right to wonder this. However, it can be downloaded and viewed through a pdf reader (such as Acrobat or Preview, etc.). If you have a computer in the classroom, the children can look at it by scrolling around and panning in and out.

Someone recently asked me if I could break up the timelines into 8.5 x 11 pieces that could then be printed out one by one and placed together. I estimate that this timeline would break up into about twenty-five pages. This might be a really cool thing for the children to piece together! Alas, I have yet to do this. Maybe soon.

Download Timeline Of Scripts Here (pdf)

Last Thursday was the last day of our week before an entire week of Spring Break. The children were looking forward to this break. They have been working very hard the last few weeks so on Thursday I gave them a “Free” work day. Unlike some other programs, we use weekly workplans (personally, I am very divided on this issue but that’s not the topic here) and so we do have a somewhat restricted idea of what counts as a job and how many jobs someone needs to do everyday. The work and amount of it vary from child to child and we give them a lot of choice but we certainly do not let them do “whatever they want”. Except for this Thursday - or at least any job that they wanted to do. The rules were simple - follow the well established groundrules of the classroom which they all knew and choose a work. Other than that, they could work on any job in the classroom and this included art. The children were very happy about this. And five of the boys (two of whom struggle to finish their weekly work) decided to fill the white board with multiplication fraction tickets. Unfortunately, I only have a picture from the beginning of it (click on the thumbmail below). From here, they went on to set the “school record for number of fraction problems in a day” (whatever that meant). They wanted to walk across the courtyard to the upper elementary classrooms to ask them what their “record” was for number of fraction problems in a day. I neither encouraged nor discouraged any of this. I simply stood and watched.

Here is a hominid family tree to download. I based it on a range of resources, both websites and books. It should be accurate but I made it two years ago so if anyone can find an error PLEASE let me know. It starts with Orrorin tugenensis 6 million year ago. (Probably an upper elementary chart but not necessarily.) Letter size pdf.

Download Hominid Tree Here (pdf)

Here is something to help with decimals. It is intended to be introduced to the student after working with the decimal board for some time. It can help with the move to abstraction. This is new and I have not really tested it in the classroom very well yet. Any comments suggestions would be helpful.

Download Decimal Paper Here