Mind Webs and “Going Out”

Last fall, we began our school year with our first field trip to Magnuson Park in Seattle, the grounds of which were once an airfield – now a sanctuary for wetland wildlife and birds of prey. Maria Montessori advocated students “going out” of the familiar classroom atmosphere and experiencing the natural environment as observers. As a scientist, Montessori understood the value of approaching the world around us as explorers, uncovering knowledge with our senses.

With the help of three Magnuson Park docents, our class of twenty students broke into sub-groups to dissect owl pellets; to explore Nature’s Grocery Store on a short circuitous walking path through overgrowth; and to create their own nests using the same materials the local avian population uses. Children enhanced their fine motor skills with tools such as tweezers – pulling tiny rodent jaws from feathers and hair in the pellets. They employed their five senses as they imagined themselves searching for edibles in the environment and planning a soft bed for their eggs.

Upon returning to school from this wonderful expedition, we met altogether at Literacy Group to make a collective mind web. Graphic organizers (such as mind webs, charts, and graphs) honor visual and spatial learners, who may prefer to draw their thoughts and move in a non-linear fashion to express themselves. As an educator, I facilitated this Literacy Group by using a few simple materials: a large (three by three foot) swath of black butcher paper, white chalk, and a small pad of post-it notes. 

First, I drew a spider web with chalk on the black background. Then, I asked students to remember any details from the field trip to Magnuson Park and modeled writing these memories on the post-its. The reason I did this in a whole group setting was to reinforce auditory, visual, and graphic learning styles. Some students remembered things right away, while others offered their observations later, after hearing their peers’ perspectives. Very quickly, we had about forty post-it notes covering our web.

The second step was to group these recollections into categories. One of the benefits of using post-it notes (rather than simply writing a list on a board) was that students saw how ideas can move around in different formations. A few categories students identified were:

• things about birds
• what happened on the way to and from the field trip
•  facts about animals
• facts about Magnuson Park
• sounds and smells

We ended our Literacy group with students working as partners to make their own mini-Mind Webs with black construction paper, chalk pastels, and post-it notes. They chose which categories they wanted to remember most and went into more detail. This is an example of how classroom studies and “going out” activities are integrated in the Montessori environment. Recent brain research describes how the act of recalling a learning experience embeds the acquired knowledge by stimulating the frontal lobe, where working memory and the faculty for organization reside!