Sylvia Glassco, Author at Greenspring Montessori School

Adolescent Odyssey to Chincoteague Island, Virginia

This fall our Adolescents ventured to Chincoteague Island, Virginia for an immersive Odyssey Trip where they enjoyed kayaking, hiking, science lessons, and lots of biking and beach time.

On the way there, students stopped for lunch and a science lesson at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge for a science lesson about saltwater and freshwater ecosystems.

The adolescents shopped for their groceries, meal prepped together, and planned several of their own activities.

On day two, the adolescents had a lesson in bike safety and physics, then biked to the beach (10.4 miles round trip)! The Adolescents were eager to explore the diverse ecosystems on the island, and they came up with many research questions to explore in the months to come. Some of the many questions included:

Is this a bone?

Is this an organism?

Why does this shell have holes in it?

What made these little balls of sand?

Why does the seagrass change color from bottom to top?

Do those birds eat on this side of the sandbar (the cove) or the other (open ocean)?

They adolescents enjoyed a morning kayaking trip through salt marshes and the Assateague Channel where they were able to visit a bald eagle’s nest.

They also spent time in nature, drawing and taking scientific observations.

The students enjoyed each other’s company throughout the trip and built confidence with new experiences from flipping pancakes to navigating the streets independently.

Why an Odyssey?

Odyssey travel offers many benefits to our students. It invites them to step out of their comfort zones by spending time away from their families and stretching their independence. In a new environment, students learn to care for and rely on each other. They bond through new experiences, such as biking to buy groceries and kayaking through a salt marsh. And, finally, Odyssey offers lots of unstructured time to be together and build community, which will strengthen our connection for the rest of the year and beyond.

2024 Adolescent Social Justice Data Fair

As part of a unit on data literacy, our Adolescents have been investigating social justice issues of their choosing in Humanities and Math classes. The students interviewed their families on social justice topics and then brought their findings to the class to brainstorm together. From there, they picked their own topics to research and formed a thesis statement.

This work introduces the concept of data literacy, offering our students an opportunity to find quality data and evaluate their sources. They then worked to aggregate and present their research to support their thesis. Some of the topics included how food delivery services might impact rural and urban food deserts, how immigration laws in the United States impact illegal immigration, and the spread of online and in-person anti-Semitic incidents. The adolescents presented their work to families, staff, and Upper Elementary students at a Social Justice Data Fair.

The Adolescents’ Microeconomy Work

In the third plane of development, the task of the Adolescent is to prepare for economic independence. Just as children in the first plane of development ask, “Help me to do it by myself” and children in the second plane ask, “Help me to think by myself,” Adolescents ask, “Help me live by myself.”

To meet this need, Dr. Montessori envisioned Adolescents participating in and managing small businesses (called “Microeconomies”) in order to experience economic activity in their community. This work provides “an opportunity to learn both academically and through actual experience what are the elements of social life.” (Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence, Appendix A). Thus, the Microeconomy functions not only as a way for students to generate funds for their projects and trips, but as an integrated curriculum that provides the opportunities for real-world, experiential learning.

At Greenspring, our Adolescents learn that economies can be based on production and exchange, capital, services, or even reciprocal relationship and community. They explore different economic models and consider the full life-cycle impacts of an activity before selecting it. What are the impacts on affected populations of people? The environment? What systems does the activity reinforce or work to break down? Microeconomy projects are large, and require both collaboration and division of labor. This is another way that the adolescents practice working together. As Michael Waski notes, “teamwork is the superpower of the adolescent.”

This year, the Adolescents began the year engaged in a compost microeconomy, where they began providing a service to their community and the environment. They created lessons to teach the other classrooms how and what to compost, which provided moments of growth for many of our students. They enjoyed collecting pumpkins to compost in early November, which led to both cooking and preserving pumpkins to eat, as well as ideas for a possible pumpkin patch in the spring.

Next, the Adolescents researched deer-free fencing to enable more ambitious gardening projects. Their hard work paid off! They have successfully grown seedlings of tomatoes, basil, kale (and more).

Bicycle Repair

Bicycle Sale

Seedlings

The Adolescents recently collected donations of bicycles in need of repair. They refurbished the bicycles and held a bike sale. The profits from the bike and seedlings sales will go towards the Adolescents’ upcoming Odyssey trip.

One of the key outcomes of Microeconomy work is what Dr. Montessori referred to as “valorization of the personality.” This is her term for an Adolescents’ process of realizing they are useful and capable of great effort. Participating in real economic activity also serves a first step towards economic independence and allows them to measure the worth of their activity against an external standard.

Adolescents “…derive great personal benefit from being initiated in economic independence. For this would result in a “valorization” of his personality, in making him feel himself capable of succeeding in life by his own efforts and on his own merits, and at the same time it would put him in direct contact with the supreme reality of social life.” (From Childhood to Adolescence, p. 65)

Montessori observed that there is more than the intellect that requires nourishment during Adolescence. She saw the importance of adolescents having opportunities to be useful to their peers, to be valorized through their own labor, and to join in the actions of society.

Adolescent Engineering Inspired by Campus Construction

The campus is abuzz with construction activity and our classrooms are eagerly joining the excitement with lessons at all levels. In our Adolescent Community, the students are beginning a unit on engineering and design to coincide with the construction. Continuing on their studies of fundamental human needs, students are exploring how humans meet the need for shelter and transportation through engineering. Students began by learning how forces interact to support a structure and how energy can be transformed to power a model car.

They are also taking this as an opportunity to reenvision the land for microeconomy projects. Later in the unit, they will be building a grow light stand to nurture seedlings in the classroom and a greenhouse to shelter them outside once they get a bit stronger. The seedlings will be available to purchase later this spring as part of our microeconomy work!