Sunday, April 30, 2017

Summer Camp: Montessori Second Great Lesson

I'm very excited about my Summer Camp this year! I'm only doing one -- since Zac is almost two and I mostly want to spend my summer hanging out with him -- and it's by special request. A parent was so interested in the Montessori Second Great Lesson ("The Coming of Life") that she suggested I turn it into a camp. She actually told me that in her son's second grade public school classroom, SCIENCE ISN'T EVEN OFFERED AS A SUBJECT. That's right... it's completely out of the curriculum!


click on the flyer image to enlarge


So I am putting together my camp and I am very blessed to have gotten a second and third round of donated Art supplies from my friend Leslie!

    pre-cut rectangles of wax paper for easy cleanup of craft projects -- ideal under the Gelli printing plates
      1000 sheets of 6 x 10 3/4 inches lightweight wax paper
      500 sheets of 10 x 10/34 inches heavyweight wax paper

    Sofft art sponges to use with pastels

    rubber stamps including eight different butterfly stamps and some unused acrylic mounting blocks, plus

      Unity Stamp Company (Poppy Background, Peony)

      Pam Carriker (Poetic Portraits)

      Traci Bautista from the Graffiti Glam Collection (Lily Doodle, Reversed Lily Doodle)

      Butterflies and Moths by Tim Holtz for Stampers Anonymous

      five alphabet stamps (capital A, C, L, Q and lowercase d)

    foam flower stamp

    ink pads including a Princess Pink dye ink pad by Umbrella Crafts and 7 Ranger Archival Ink Pads plus re-inkers (two refills of the Jet Black) and Ranger Inkssentials Cleans-It All Purpose Stamp Cleaner 2-Ounce

    more tubes and bottles of acrylic paint: snow (titanium) white, cadmium yellow medium hue, cadmium yellow light hue, medium magenta, brilliant purple, brilliant yellow green

    watercolor paints

    five boxes of oil pastels, both water soluble and not, including


    Derwent Inktense Ink Pencils, set of 12

    assorted natural items for stamping including willow balls and lotus pods

    nine sheets of assorted reusable plastic stencils including geometric designs, insects and flowers, birds and tree branches, as well two sizes of the human head, plus

    These stamps and stencils will be so great for our Calendar Project! We are going to take the entire time Earth has been in existence and compress it to a scale of 365 days, then create a 2017 Calendar for each child to take home which will show WHEN each new form of life evolved (or was wiped out). As they use the calendar for the rest of this year, they will be reminded of the Second Great Lesson. And it's a perfect project for giving kids a concrete sense of just how much time passed before there even was any life on this planet!

    (I'm using the Time Analogy information from page 37 of Michelle Breyer's Early Humans. Knowledge is ever-evolving and science doesn't stand still. Scientists continue to provide us with more evidence all the time... but this will serve as our starting point.)

    The best part is that each 12 x 12 blank calendar has a section where you create the artwork for that month, and our stencils will be great for creating art that represents what was living on Earth at that time. Even the Clouds stencil represents an important stage in Earth's History and the Coming of Life!

    And Becca just had the greatest idea! The BEST thank-you gift I can give Leslie would be to make her one of these calendars! She will love seeing that all of the art supplies that sat unused on her shelves are now being used and well-loved. I appreciate her generosity so much!!

    P.S. If you take a stencil out of the packaging and then wish you hadn't, 12" x 12" page protectors are awesome! They are also hole punched for a three ring binder. Having all your stencils organized in a binder is so much nicer than searching through a pile, and you don't have to worry that the fragile parts of the designs will get ripped up.


If you want to watch a great TED talk about this topic, I highly recommend this one by the amazing nature photographer Franz Lanting. His work on this topic is also available as a coffee table book:


You can also find a list of all the books I use when I teach this lesson on my Montessori Lending Library page. The Lending Library Card is one of the services I offer (in addition to homeschool consulting and curriculum writing). It's just $36.00 per year, which is $3.00 a month and less than 10 cents a day!


This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!

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