Cortés, a Cardboard Boat, and an Audience of Eight-Year-Olds
The Year 5 and 6 students had a lesson on ancient Aztec civilisation. It was, by their own account, extremely interesting.
What happened next was not on any plan. They decided to write a play about it.
The play covered Aztec culture and the arrival of Hernán Cortés, and it was set in an Aztec market. They made the props themselves, including a boat. When it was ready they invited the Stage 2 class — the six-to-nine-year-olds — to come and watch.
The account of it in the school newsletter was written by the students. It ends: “We had a lot of fun!”
What “follow-up work” means
In a Montessori classroom, a lesson is a beginning rather than a delivery. The teacher presents an idea to a child or a small group, and then the children choose how to pursue it.
That choice is called follow-up work, and it is where most of the actual learning happens. A lesson on the Aztecs might produce a research booklet, a timeline, a map, a model, a presentation to the class — or a play with a cardboard boat and an audience of younger children.
The teacher does not assign the format. This is the part that surprises visiting parents most, and it is the part that does the heavy lifting: a child who has chosen how to respond to a lesson has to work out what they actually understood, what they still need to find out, and how to make it comprehensible to someone else.
Performing it for a younger class raises the stakes again. You cannot bluff an eight-year-old audience. If your explanation of why Cortés arrived does not make sense, they will say so.
The Five Great Stories
Aztec civilisation is not a random topic. Montessori’s primary curriculum is built on what are called the Five Great Stories — sweeping accounts of the beginning of the Earth, the coming of life, the coming of humans, the story of writing and the story of numbers.
The stories are told to the whole class, and they are deliberately enormous. Their purpose is to give children a frame big enough to hang everything else on: once a child has a sense of the whole span of human history, an Aztec market has somewhere to sit.
From that frame, children choose where to dig. The stories are designed to provoke exactly the response these students had — the impulse to go further into one corner of it, and then to tell someone.
The same term, in the same classroom
The newsletter entry that describes the play sits alongside three other things the class was doing that fortnight, which together give a fair picture of a Montessori upper primary term.
They learned to make worry dolls, in the Guatemalan tradition, to mark the 150th anniversary of Maria Montessori’s birth. They were reading Home to Mother as a shared text and watching Rabbit-Proof Fence, as part of learning about the Stolen Generations. And in mathematics they were working on tessellation, experimenting with materials to build patterns.
A play about Cortés, worry dolls, the Stolen Generations and tessellation, in one fortnight, in one room, at the children’s own pace.
Why we tell this story
Prospective parents often ask, reasonably, what stops a child from doing nothing.
The honest answer is that in a properly prepared classroom the problem almost never presents in that form. What actually happens is that a child hears something interesting and then wants to build a boat about it.
The teacher’s job is to make sure the lesson is good enough to provoke that, and that the materials are there when it does.