“Human consciousness comes into the world as a flaming ball of imagination.” –Dr Maria Montessori
After the “Coming of Life” great lesson follows the “Coming of Humans” story. We have been studying the different eons and eras, and we’ve studied fundamental needs of humans by going camping and visiting a wool farm; here’s some of our latest hands-on history work.
Booklist
The Jennifer Morgan series (that follows the Montessori Great Lessons) is just tops. I love the art and the writing is story-based, full of weird tidbits my kids eat up, making Mammals Who Morph magnificent for lower elementary.
Likewise I was impressed with the art and narrative of The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerstein. The story is from the perspective of an 8-year-old who invents the first drawing. My kids loved it, and it’s a great way to jump into cave art and more true historical studies.
Lastly we read Early People; it has a lot of great illustrations and is written as a reference guide. It follows human progression through the earliest ancestors to bronze age, stone age and into early civilizations. It made me want to jump into our ancient civilization materials, but I had to remind myself that we had early human materials that really need to be cleared off the shelf (I need more space)!
We talked about early migrations, primitive tools (so cool being able to reflect on throwing spears with an atlatl firsthand and recently seeing the bones of a wooly mammoth that lived in our area), fire starting and cave drawings.
Timeline of Early Humans from Azoka.
I asked the kids what they thought being stuck in a cave during a blizzard in the ice age might be like. Considering we’re social isolating right now, the kids easily drew a connection noting that “back then they didn’t even have TV” or other modern forms of entertainment. We thought about the different activities early man may have engaged in while in the cave: cooking, games, storytelling and of course creating cave art.
We used what we had to try it out too.
So we finished up our fire-making with homemade charcoal “cave” art. We learned a lot about primitive man and definitely stoked the flames of imagination.
Highly recommend these books and starting your own fires.
This is amazing! Everything you do is amazing!