The Second Great Lesson: The Coming of Life

Today we picked up our evolutionary story at the point where we left off: the cyanobacteria in the oceans. We traced the story of life as it evolved from the seas onto land through the six periods of the Paleozic Era through the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and more diversified land life through the Mezozoic Era and up through the massive change that took place through the Neogenic Era which saw the development of modern lifeforms. We used the one hundred foot black strip that Montessori devised to show the virtually infintessimal time (2 minutes out of twelve hours on the Clock of Eras) that humans have inhabited the earth. In fact, they arrive right at the very end on a 1″ red strip once the whole strip is unfurled. The lesson is both a sensorial (the strip and all the elements we place on it) and a timeline overview (placement of cards for each species in order). It is told as a story over the course of the morning with a call at the end for us to consider our responsibility as humans with our particular set of adaptive features. Through the story we cover continental and climactic change, the emergence and adaptations of life forms, and finally, the great cataclysms that affected life through the eras of time. The children will now go back to the classroom to do follow up work individually and in small groups which they present to each other in conference. Our next story, The Coming of Humans, will follow in January tracing hominids to modern day Homo sapien sapiens.