MORGANTOWN — Just how big is Jupiter, anyway?
Do this: Put a basketball — and a grape — next to one another on a table.
In terms of interstellar scale, the basketball is Jupiter and the grape is us.
Planet Earth, that is.
At the Morgantown Montessori Preschool on Wedgewood Drive, Jupiter and the planets are as huge as ever.
Students spent the last several days creating giant 6-foot renderings of the Solar System and the planets that call it home. Now, every wall is its own solar system.
Charlotte Dye, a 5-year-old who attends the preschool, can tell you all about it.
“I like Jupiter,” she said. “It’s a gas giant. And I like our sun, except it isn’t really a planet.”
Erin Lambert, who founded Morgantown Montessori in 2012 after deciding to not go to graduate school at Columbia, appreciates hearing the factoids delivered by the post-toddlers with nary a flinch.
Visit the school on Facebook or online to find out more. The phone number is 304-844-7605.
In the meantime, Monday, there was the Solar System, and all sorts of planetary things to consider.
“Now they look up when it gets dark,” Lambert said. “It’s really staying with them.”
Which is the point of Montessori.
Dr. Maria Montessori, who founded the learning method, was a physician, educator and humanitarian in Italy.
Early in her career, she was tasked with the care and education of a group of children from working parents.
That’s when she discovered that students naturally learn on their own, if the environment is right.
And the more independence they’re granted, the more confident and successful they become as students.
Montessori died in 1952, but by then, her movement was a method.
Lambert’s mother, Morgan Harbert, who also teaches at the Montessori school here, can tell you all about the critics of such schools.
The ones who say classrooms without traditional structure beget youngsters who are unfocused and self-indulgent.
“Hey, I’ll put this environment up against any out there,” she said.
There is a curriculum, she said, with math, science, English and all the offerings of any school. It’s just that the delivery system is different.
Harbert was educated in a Montessori school founded in the U.S. Virgin Islands by her parents, who were both north-central West Virginia natives who settled there in the late 1950s.
Her father, who grew up in Morgantown, went to law school after fighting in the Korean War. Her mother taught in a one-room school in Farmington, Marion County, for a time.
“Now with Erin, we’re third-generation,” Harbert said.
Charlotte and her twin brother (and fellow student) Holten, are generations unto themselves, meanwhile.
Holten, in fact, is already branching out, with a burgeoning interest in rocketry and robots.
On this day, he sketched an automaton, which he christened, “Robo.”
“I want to cut him out,” he said, reaching for pair of scissors, the kids’ version.
Harbert teased him: “Don’t run with those.”
“I won’t,” he said, grinning.
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