Cultural Studies, Geography, and Peace Education play a crucial part in the Montessori curriculum across all age groups. These curriculum areas work in harmony as a means to create worldly, empathetic citizens of planet Earth. However, my experience with Early Childhood classrooms has often seen this education occurring just in the context of the classroom – while Montessori classrooms have beautifully designed and helpful materials for teaching these areas, our classrooms don't necessarily reflect the growing interconnectedness of the world through technology.
Perhaps this is a good thing! After all, I teach children as young as three who will undoubtedly be exposed to digital media and iDevices outside of school, if they haven't been already. With this in mind, I am generally in no rush to push tech for my young students. However, there are more passive, teacher-generated ways to introduce apps or sites in a way that is complementary to the child's normal work. The existing Montessori geography materials include globes and maps that give concrete tools to practice mapping and nomenclature. Using these materials, even my youngest students can begin to build knowledge of our world, such as types of land and water formations, or names of continents and countries.
Perhaps this is a good thing! After all, I teach children as young as three who will undoubtedly be exposed to digital media and iDevices outside of school, if they haven't been already. With this in mind, I am generally in no rush to push tech for my young students. However, there are more passive, teacher-generated ways to introduce apps or sites in a way that is complementary to the child's normal work. The existing Montessori geography materials include globes and maps that give concrete tools to practice mapping and nomenclature. Using these materials, even my youngest students can begin to build knowledge of our world, such as types of land and water formations, or names of continents and countries.
By practicing with these materials, the children are able to learn to identify distinct landforms, and begin to internalize the layout of our planet. Even children as young as three have proven themselves able to memorize names of continents, and find the land masses on a globe.
When I was introduced to the web app Radio Garden, I was immediately reminded of the Geography curriculum. After all, if my students can identify continents on a physical globe, perhaps they could do the same on a virtual one! This service provides an easy and unique way to get a glimpse into other parts of the world: by streaming radio from a selected portion of the globe. It could be a wonderful resource to get young children's brains thinking outside of their own surroundings, and even inspire more questions about faraway cultures. Utilizing this tool could make for an exciting and novel extension to the existing geography curriculum, for the student who has spent plenty of time with the maps and globes and is hungry for more.
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| Radio Garden has a simple, in-browser interface for selecting a region to listen to. |
I envision this being used with teacher oversight rather than independently, for a few reasons: first, young children may be unfamiliar with the ideas of dragging a mouse cursor, scrolling on a trackpad, or other actions. Even if the child did have this level of computer savvy, the site may still be difficult to navigate for a young child from a fine motor perspective. Furthermore, there doesn't appear to be any filter for explicit content, besides what the individual radio station censors. It would be helpful to have a teacher supervising and listening in case the station needs to be changed for content reasons.
This application could be applied in a number of ways in the classroom. A child might want to choose his or her own location to find a radio station, if there is a country or continent that piques particular interest. It could also be used during group times, as part of a cultural unit of study. This could generate some great discussion – the group could listen to radio from the place being studied, and make observations/inquiries based on what they heard. There is also a possible point of consciousness about the interconnectedness of cultures: if a child heard a familiar song on a radio station from overseas, imagine how exciting that may feel – that people on another continent are enjoying the same music that I am! While I feel the Montessori curriculum does a wonderful job of laying groundwork for future citizens of the world, a service like Radio Garden could be a fun and educational way to extend this knowledge, and expose children to other cultures in an organic way.
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