What Are the Montessori Great Lessons?
The Montessori Great Lessons are five big stories traditionally presented during the elementary years.
Montessori described the elementary stage as the second plane of development, generally spanning ages 6 to 12. At this stage, children are increasingly able to reason, imagine things they cannot directly see, ask big questions, and make connections between ideas.
That developmental change is important.
During the earlier Montessori years, we give your child rich, concrete experiences. Your child touches, carries, sorts, pours, counts, compares, builds, listens, and moves.
Then elementary arrives, and suddenly your child can mentally travel somewhere their body has never been.
Back billions of years.
Inside a star.
Into an ancient civilization.
Under an ocean.
Across the universe.
Oh my gosh, this is such a fun age to teach.
The Great Lessons give that growing imagination somewhere magnificent to go.
Traditionally, there are five:
The Coming of the Universe and Earth
The Coming of Life
The Coming of Human Beings
The Story of Communication and Language
The Story of Numbers
But simply knowing their names misses the loveliest part.
Each Great Lesson opens a door.
Your child hears a big story, becomes curious about some tiny piece of it, and begins asking questions. Those questions can lead naturally into science, history, geography, language, mathematics, art, music, and independent research.
That interconnected approach is part of what makes Montessori elementary education feel so alive.
Adults get excited about these lessons, too, when they discover just how rich they are and how beautifully they stimulate your child's imagination.
And honestly, it is hard not to get excited about them.
We're talking about the universe. Life. Humans. Language. Numbers.
Big stuff!
The Great Lessons are one beautiful part of a much larger Montessori homeschool curriculum that connects subjects rather than teaching everything in isolation.
The First Great Lesson: The Story of the Origin of the Universe
So how did the universe actually begin?
This story explains to your child that before the existence of the universe, before we had SOMEthing, there was NOTHING.
This is an immense and abstract idea to impart to your child. Before the age of six, this kind of nothingness, wildness, and bigness can be difficult to conceive, so in the zero to six age group, we keep learning very concrete.
Once your child is around six years old and coming into that Second Plane of Development, we start to offer these enormous ideas and let them know that there's more to life than what they can see and experience on Earth today.
So we start with the origin of the whole universe. The Big Bang. The elements. How particles interacted with each other to create the building blocks that eventually became the Earth we know today.
This is a deeply intense story to tell your child. And it is such a powerful one. Most children AND ADULTS are blown away when they hear it.
The whole idea of the existence of the universe, that it did not exist and then one day it did, seems almost magical. And it can lead us very quickly into questions of spirituality and religion.
In Montessori's tradition, this story has also been known as "God with No Hands." The story creates space for children and families to wonder about enormous scientific questions while also making room for the spiritual or metaphysical questions those ideas may inspire.
The Second Great Lesson: The Story of the Origin of Life
Next comes the story of how life developed on Earth.
We look at Earth and how it came to be within our solar system. Then we consider what Earth might have been like as life first began developing.
These conversations are grounded in science. We want your child to understand that humans, as we are today, didn't always exist.
So we go way, way back in time and tell your child about some of the earliest creatures on Earth, what they looked like, how life changed, and how living things began to evolve.
Suddenly, the history of life is open before them.
The Third Great Lesson: The Story of the Origin of Humans
This is a continuation of that enormous evolutionary story.
We explore early humans, what our ancestors may have looked like, and the very long road that eventually leads to humans as we know ourselves today.
Compared to the vastness of life developing on Earth, we've only been here for a very, very short amount of time.
I love that perspective for elementary children.
We can look at this enormous timeline that leads all the way to humans today and begin wondering about how people came to live the way we do now.
The Fourth Great Lesson: The Story of Communication
This story is all about how humans learned to communicate with each other.
How did we share an idea before we could write it down?
We can explore gestures and signs, pictorial representations like those humans left behind on cave walls, and eventually the development of different kinds of writing and lettering systems.
Then we begin to see how those systems evolved toward the forms of written communication we use today.
Think about what this does for language learning.
Letters are no longer just arbitrary shapes your child is expected to memorize. Writing has a human story behind it.
The Fifth Great Lesson: The Story of Numbers
This is the story of how humans learned to count, why counting became important to us, and what people may have needed to count in the first place.
It also introduces your child to early numbers and number systems.
And it might be surprising even to you to discover all the different ways humans have counted throughout history. The symbols we recognize as numbers today were certainly not always 0 through 9.
Math has a story, too!
But the Great Lessons Don't Stop Here
Montessorians have imagined many, many, many other Great Lessons that children might want to explore during this special time of life from ages 6 to 12.
I bet if you really think about it, you can dream up some just by looking around your house and contemplating your own life.
There are a million different kinds of origin stories you could tell your child or research together.
How did music come to be?
What is the origin of music on Earth?
What is the origin of art?
How did people begin making the objects we use every day?
Anything you can trace backward through time and dramatically share the origin of can become an invitation into deeper learning.
And that brings us to something really important.
There Is No One Right Way to Explore the Great Lessons
Everyone discovers the Great Lessons and immediately wants to know when and how to teach them exactly.
I understand the impulse.
These stories are incredible. Of course you want to get them right.
But I will tell you, there's no one right way!
Maria Montessori understood that these kinds of stories could set the elementary child's imagination on fire and spark a deep curiosity about the world.
That's the point.
We don't tell these origin stories because every child needs to memorize these EXACT stories. We tell them because the stories can help your child become more interested in their world and spark ideas for further exploration.
They are a jumping off point.
Think about the Origin of the Universe. There are so many things your child could study based on that one story.
Chemistry.
The elements.
The solar system.
Galaxies.
The birth and death of stars.
Your child could become completely fascinated by one tiny piece of this enormous story and want to stay there for a while.
Wonderful!
There's so much to learn about the universe beyond this one story.
The five Great Lessons give your child somewhere to begin. From there, questions and interests can stretch outward into science, history, geography, language, mathematics, art, music, and research.
That's why the Great Lessons are such a cornerstone of the Montessori elementary approach.
And it is also why I don't want you worrying that you need to become an expert on the entire history of the universe before you can share them with your child!
You don't.
You need a beautiful story, a little preparation, and the willingness to wonder alongside your child.
That is more than enough to begin Montessori with your own child at home.
