Taught a full day workshop at the Princeton Center for Teacher Education in July which covered the story of life and the story of humans (2 and 3 in the Great Lessons). Maria Montessori insisted that storytelling should come first and study later, since storytelling can best ignite the imagination of the child (and all ages for that matter!). I modeled storytelling and then the students had time to internalize the steps of the story and tell it in their own unique way . . . and then act it out. In only 45 minutes, the teachers created ways to act out the story using simple props and then did it. Their creativity was fabulous as you see here with the picture of the gastornis bird in the rainforest and the horse moving out of the rainforest to develop a symbiotic relationship with grass. (The little horse at the bottom is hard to see.) A high point for me was hear how Mammals Who Morph is being used by one of the teachers in New Orleans where students experience drive by shootings in their neighborhoods. This teacher said that the page about apes attacking strangers provoked powerful conversations among her students about the evolution of decision making and the power to overcome automatic behavior.
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