When a story is told…

The Five Great Stories

By Nieva Armstrong, Lower Elementary Teacher

Who does not love listening to stories? As a child, one of my fondest memories is my grandfather telling us stories about his childhood and the life he and his family had. Stories are how ancient peoples conveyed their methods of searching for food, choosing a place to shelter them from the elements, and avoiding animals that threatened them. Wise men captured the wondering mind of people by teaching them through story-telling. The great thinkers shared their thoughts and ideas through their own story-telling styles.   

The Montessori Elementary classroom is filled with storytelling.  There are short stories told early in the children’s life in the elementary; longer stories are told along the way as more seeds for the children to ponder and study. There are stories that are accompanied with demonstration. An example of this is the story of how geometry got its name. As this story is told, the children act like the ancient Egyptians who were hired as rope stretchers. The Egyptian rope stretchers were the ones who help measure the land near the Nile River after their plot of farm land got wiped out by a flood.  Then there are others that, when told, are accompanied with the impressionistic charts. There are realistic images, like the rock mountains, and a few that are illustrated with the use personification. An example of this is the chart about water, that settled in a crack, froze, expanded, and broke a segment from the rock. The chart shows a human, being awoken from deep sleep, to illustrate the expanding quality of freezing water. There are also stories that are told, but are not accompanied by any visual aid. The Story of Plant is an example of this. This story tells the functions and parts of the plants, and what they need to provide to others in order to fulfill their cosmic task.

The Five Great Stories

Among the many stories given to the elementary children, the five Great Stories are told early--ideally in the first six weeks of the school year. They are told to the new children in the elementary and the returning children are invited to listen again for new insights. Any of these can also be repeated any time during the year to a group of new children, or even to one new child. The five Great Stories serve as a framework for the children’s cosmic education. The stories are told to ignite interest in the children’s physical world, and interest in human invention. There are no activities that come directly after each story. The activities of the children come after giving them the key lessons. The key lessons are what provide the children clear and specific ideas to explore at their own pace and when their interest is piqued.

The five Great Stories are: God Who Has No Hands, The Story of the Coming of Life, The Story of the Coming of the Human Beings, The Story of Our Alphabet, and The Story of Our Numerals.

The first Great Story is called God Who Has No Hands. It tells the story of the creation of the universe and of the Earth. There are three main stories being told here: 1) that from one nucleus the universe burst out, 2) the dimension of the universe, and 3) how the Earth was formed.

The story begins with a dialogue between the people and their elders. As the story unfolds the children hears that everything, even the tiniest particle, follows its nature, its laws. They hear that from what appears to be chaotic in the beginning, order and harmony unfolds. In telling this story, a demonstration, to illustrate the nature of gas, liquid and solid, is shown. The children see that matter changes its state based on temperature. They look at the chart called “The Dance of the Elements,” that shows how hot matter rises as vapor, and cool matter falls to the surface. They also see a volcano model that simulates an eruption, which illustrates what happened in the early stages of Earth’s formation. Then, toward the end of the story, the children see the chart that illustrates the principle that the Earth and the Sun are in perfect harmony, following the laws laid out for them at the beginning of time.

In telling this, the story opens the children’s study of the states of matter, mixture, compound and solution. It directs their attention to the study of the sun and the Earth and everything related to them. It leads them to the different fields of study related to physical science.

The second Great Story is the Story of the Coming of Life. This story also begins with a conversation among four characters: the Sun, the Air, the Water, and the Rocks. Then, with the unrolling of the Timeline of Life chart, it shows the presence of life in the ocean. The children hear that these one-celled organisms became the foundation of life on Earth. The timeline illustrates the appearance of trilobites, crinoids, coral polyps, marsh plants, insects, spore-bearing plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, angiosperms, birds, mammals and last, the human beings. Also on the timeline chart the children’s attention gets drawn to the red lines that illustrate the life line of the creatures, and the icicles that illustrates the occurrence of ice ages.

The children always get excited when they see the timeline chart. They get very stimulated to draw the pictures on the chart and work on the cutout pictures that accompany the blank timeline. When they see the pictures of dinosaurs under the Mesozoic era, beginning and fluent new children come together to explore what they know about dinosaurs. Older children explore rock formation, and fossils. They investigate the fossil samples found on the shelf and place them on the timeline. Other children start reading about sponges, jellyfish, corals, and other animals and plants that interest them.

The Story of the Coming of the Human Beings, the third Great Story, tells about the human beings as a unique. In telling this story the children hear about what makes human beings different from other animals. They hear about the complex human brain and that, with it, we humans are able to imagine and work on solutions to situations that confront us. It tells about our unique hands—hands with an opposable thumb—that that enables us to pick up even the most delicate object on the seashore, and to create tools that satisfy our fundamental needs.

The fourth is the Story of Our Alphabet. It tells how human beings, after inventing an oral language, invented a way of recording their thoughts and ideas. It tells about the ancient Egyptians using picture writing. The Phoenician merchants invented only sound pictures to write their language. That it is the same idea the children learned when they traced the sandpaper. The charts showing the Greeks and the Romans alphabet are shown. The children, through observing the charts, see some similarity of these letters to the English alphabet.

The Story of Our Numerals is the fifth and final Great Story. This story tells about human beings having, in their own languages, words denoting numbers. This story opens the children’s exploration of the Babylonian cuneiform writing and numeration, the Greek, Egyptian, and Roman numerals, and the numerals from other civilizations, like the Chinese. From this story, the children hear about the importance of zero, which has its origin in the Hindu numerals. They hear about the Arab scholars that, despite having their own way of writing, adapted the Hindu writing, and helped spread the Hindu numerals in the European world. Those concerted efforts, along with the invention of the printing press, in 1450, along with the symbol for zero, made it possible to print any number, like printing the number 1450.  

In listening to the Story of Our Alphabet and the Story of Our Numerals, the children learn to give reverence to the people that came before them who gave them the gift of the alphabet and written numerals.

From the short stories told in the primary, to the Great Stories given in the elementary, the Montessori classroom is rich with stories. These stories are what lead and guide the children in their later study in the different fields of study, like History, and the Sciences. While at the moment these stories guide the children on what to feed their intellect, Maria Montessori’s hope does not end there. She saw these stories as the beginning of the human beings’ journey of exploring their cosmic task, which I believe is captured in her writing. Montessori said, says “When man (human being) loses himself in mere speculations, his environment will remain unchanged, but when imagination starts from contact with reality, thought begins to construct works by means of which the external world becomes transformed. It appears that the thoughts of man (human being) had assumed a marvelous power: the power to create.” (Maria Montessori, The Advanced Montessori Method – I, The Clio Montessori Series, Chapter IX, Imagination, p. 186).