Welcome to Breathtaking Iceland!

Hi, again! This post doesn't have to do with music, but it does pertain to Montessori education. I was inspired to offer you some materials in light of this newest confinement and school closure in France.

During these times of distance learning, if you’re like me, you’re tired of throwing worksheets at the children, tired of loading them up with cheap, laminated facsimiles of the Montessori materials, and tired of scrambling for days leading up to a vacation—a time when the children need more than ever stable, level-headed adult role models—to get materials together for the children to bring home.

I wanted to create something simple, clean, easy to reproduce, and multi-faceted to give the children, so that they could do at home the kinds of dynamic projects we ask them to do in class, rather than just wasting their time filling in blanks, or cutting out fake Montessori materials, or pestering their parents to show them what to do with a set of laminated stamp game stamps. I wanted something that the children could work with independently and get a lot of mileage out of, and yet something that for us would be easy to make. I envisioned packets of multi-faceted and cross-curricular learning material.

So, in pursuit of these goals, I decided on a theme and used that theme to create ONE work packet for children that contains zero, count them, 0, worksheets, but which covers all eight Montessori subjects.

My theme was a visit to another country. Recently I put together a packet about Iceland. This single packet invites children to learn about the history of Iceland, study its geography, and solve mathematical story problems concerning life in Iceland, including calculating how much gas would be needed to drive around the island, or how to cook a certain Icelandic cuisine. The packet accesses Geometry by asking children to calculate the surface area of a fictional Viking hut that was dug up by archaeologists and analyze the use of line and shape in an abstract painting. In the language arena, the packet has quotations about Iceland for the children to analyze and interpret, as well as symbolize with grammar symbols.

The Music section explores the life and music of the critically-acclaimed Icelandic pop singer Björk. In the Music section, the packet directs children to listen to a live radio recording Björk did when she was 11 years old. Then it invites them to compose their own music and create original electronic beats a la Björk using an online app called Incredibox. In addition to all of this stuff, the packet has critical thinking questions for the children to answer as well as small ideas for writing and creating follow-ups like timelines and maps.

In all, this ONE simple packet contains more than enough for a child to dive into in one or two weeks of confinement. These packets only took me about 3 hours to put together, far less time than printing, laminating, cutting, and distributing hundreds of fill-in-the blank documents. They are intended for children in a 9-12 class, but my immediate colleague and I have designed others for children much younger. We gave these packets to our 9-12 children last year, and they loved them. The parents raved about them.

Still, I think these packets could use some tweaking to make them perfect. So, I’m offering them to you for download, hoping that you might be able to use them with your children, but also hoping you can look them over and give me feedback on how to make them even better. After all, we’re here to learn from each other.

I would love it if you would download them and use them as you see fit. If you find anything that needs tweaking, or if you have ideas that would make these packets better, I would love to hear from you.

Here are the packets on Spain, Italy, and Iceland.

More later!