Homes and Habitats

Citizens of the World


Students in Pre-kindergarten and 3rd grade have been thinking about natural habitats and caring for the world in ways both large and small. The investigations in these two classrooms emerged from very different learning goals, but they share a number of elements that illustrate the ways in which curriculum and skills build from year to year in our school.

In Pre-K, the children have been studying sculpture as an art form. They spent an exciting day at the DeCordova Museum’s outdoor sculpture park, where they had the opportunity to see a collection of large works of art made from a wide variety of materials. At school, they watched part of a film about the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy, who makes beautiful creations from natural materials. Before Thanksgiving, the class read A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle. In the story, Hermit Crab has outgrown his home and must find a larger place to live. The shell he chooses is the right fit, but it is quite austere. Fortunately, Hermit Crab’s friends and neighbors provide colorful decoration, protection and adornment for the new home. After reading the book, the teachers presented the children with Styrofoam bowls and decorating items to build their own houses for Hermit Crab. Sitting around the classroom tables, the children built doors, balconies, and windows. They shared ideas, elaborated on their designs and, as Mrs. Zamore said, “learned about real things through fantasy.”

At the other end of the school, our third graders are immersed in a study of biomes—ecologically similar regions of the world characterized by climate, soil type, animals and plants. Each student chose one biome for a research project that involved note-taking, oral presentation, and teaching a lesson to the rest of the class. For one component of the unit, the children composed riddles and challenged their classmates to figure out which biome was being described. The students also created “biomes in a box” using shoeboxes to construct three-dimensional representations of their biomes, including at least three plants and three animals, as well as other details to illustrate the scenes. Just as their younger counterparts had done, these students helped each other with design concepts (multi-story rainforests and animals with moving parts were admired and adapted in several models), and made use of a variety of materials to show what they had learned. Ms. Twarog described this unit as a wonderful opportunity to emphasize the concept of global citizenship, and of our responsibility to care for and understand the diversity of plant and animal life on the planet. From his home in the marine biome, Hermit Crab can feel comforted by the stewardship of our students.

Over the River

Over the River


“Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the second of his Four Quartets, “East Coker.” Although the poem is not a testament to the importance of learning geography, this line provides an insight into the way children develop a sense of place. At Belmont Day, geography begins with the local and the familiar, gradually increasing children’s knowledge of the places, features, and people of the world.

We approach social studies by emphasizing respect for the locations and cultures that comprise our program, starting with locations that the students know best. A wonderful example of this practice is just reaching completion in second grade, where the students have worked carefully to describe their favorite places. This writing exercise encourages the children to provide rich detail about a spot in their world that is most special to them and to explain why. The purpose of the project is not to generate a list of exotic destinations but to develop a deeper understanding of what makes a place special. As we enter the winter holiday season, many of us are looking forward to spending time in places such as these—places that are important because of memories we hold, or people who live there, or celebrations that occur in those spots.

Thinking about special places gives us an opportunity to reflect on the human element of the world. We can know a place in terms of pure geography: where it is, what it looks like, how far away it is (and if you’re driving to Grandma’s, this may lead to the age-old question, "Are we there yet?"). We can also define a place in terms of time: what happened in this spot in our personal memories, family legacies, and traditions, or, as the 3rd graders' trip to Plimoth Plantation illustrates, we can learn about a place in terms of its broader historic significance. We may, in addition, consider a place in terms of anthropology: who lives here, what do they do, and what is the central nature of their culture? Each of these categories of geography receives its due attention in the course of our curriculum, as our students grow and gain a deeper understanding about what it means to locate a place in the world.

Incidentally, T.S. Eliot’s poem, “East Coker,” is named for a village in Somerset, England, near his family’s ancestral home. Near the end of the final poem in the Quartets, “Little Gidding,” the poet returns to the idea of knowing the world:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Life and Times

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was teaching 3rd grade that year, and I remember engaging in long conversations with my colleagues about how to talk with our students about the context and significance of the events taking place in Europe. As I watched images from 1989 on television this week, I was reminded of those discussions, and of the complexities of teaching history to young children.

In his landmark work The Process of Education (1960), noted psychologist Jerome Bruner advanced the idea that “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.” People are often skeptical about this claim: Any subject? At any stage of development? Bruner went on to explain that a good curriculum introduces children to concepts in small, manageable ways, building upon those concepts each year through a process called spiraling. Our approach to teaching history reflects a great deal of Bruner’s philosophy, beginning with a deep understanding of cognitive development.

What does it mean to teach about the past to primary school students, whose sense of time is not fully developed? Pre-Kindergarteners, for example, have only a vague understanding of elapsed time, or of the precise meaning of time-related words such as weeks, months, or years. When we teach about things that happened long ago, we don’t expect these children to remember dates or sequences. We focus on gradually building their awareness of the passage of time in large and small ways. During a read-aloud, a teacher might pause and ask, “what are some clues that show us this story happened a long time ago?”

When the first graders embarked on their study of inventions and inventors, they were introduced to history through compelling stories about individuals whose contributions improved life or added new ideas to the world. The teachers and students discussed history through small important moments, examining innovations that spanned the past several hundred years. As they learned about Benjamin Franklin, or about how and when blue jeans were invented, the children expanded their knowledge about what the world was like in those times.

Following Bruner’s idea of spiraling, our history curriculum builds each year upon the skills and stories presented earlier, becoming more complex and detailed. As our students get older, they are better able to grasp the idea of time in a historic sense. They gain a greater ability to appreciate the context for people’s actions and the significance of events at particular times in history.