Montessori cosmic education · from a Wairarapa farm
Forty-seven courses and 965 lessons for home-educating families, built in a farm classroom in the Whangaehu Valley and now open to anyone, anywhere. The story runs from the first moment of the universe to the work of your own hands.
Three lessons are open to everyone, in full, with no account needed.
How it began
Julia had been teaching for the better part of twenty years before any of this had a name. She opened a Montessori day for home-educated children on a working farm in the Whangaehu Valley: proper materials, a prepared room, and the time for a child to stay with something until they were finished with it. Small on purpose, and rural by choice.
The classroom came first
Cosmic education works. Give a six year old the whole universe as a story and they will chase it for months: into rocks, into rivers, into the numbers people invented to count their sheep. We watched it happen at the same table, over and over.
We also learned the limit. The Wairarapa is a small place, and a room on a farm can only hold so many: eight children a day. There are home-educating families all over New Zealand who will never drive down our road.
And then the campus
So we built the campus: the whole of the second plane, the same five great stories, the same strands, written out lesson by lesson so a family can sit down at their own table and begin. Forty-seven courses, 965 lessons, and every one of them ends away from the screen with something to build, grow or walk out to.
The farm day is still here, and still small. The campus is how the rest of the country gets in.
Who teaches it
Every lesson on the campus, and every day on the farm, comes from one teacher. Julia has worked in education since 2006 and has been a certificated teacher since 2016. In twenty years she has taught more than a thousand children. Police vetted and first aid trained, and still in the room with the children rather than away from it.
A Montessori Teaching Diploma from Aperfield, a Postgraduate Diploma of Teaching (ECE) from Massey, and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Psychology. Her ground is the six to twelve years: the plane where cosmic education belongs.
Every lesson was written for this campus, from the ground up and under Julia's direction, for the children in our own room first and then for yours.
Ask a question in the whānau portal and Julia answers it herself: about a lesson, about a child who has stalled, or about what to do next. There is no call centre here, and never will be.
One morning, in that room
In Julia’s words
A very young child asked me to read a picture book with them. I began reading, and then they took over. It was a very familiar book, so I assumed they had memorised the story. So I found a new one, that we had never shared before. They read it word for word.
What followed was years of rich language: stories with harder adjectives in them, words we played with and took apart and worked out the meaning of together.
Nobody taught that child to read on a schedule. The room was prepared, the books were within reach, and the adult noticed. That is the whole method in one morning.
Two ways in
Cosmic education at your own table, for children six to twelve, anywhere in the world. Three lessons are open to everyone with no account needed: How volcanoes work, The whole Earth and Day and Night.
Eighteen lessons written for the adult, not the child: how a Montessori lesson is given, what to do when a child stalls, and how to keep a record that holds up. Included with every place.
Cosmic education
“The child who has felt a strong love for his surroundings and for all living creatures, who has discovered joy and enthusiasm in work, gives us reason to hope…”
Maria Montessori
Montessori begins with the whole universe and finds the child’s place within it: the sun, the seasons, the soil, and the small green shoot. Out here, that is not a poster on a wall. It is the paddock, the weather, the animals and the night sky, all part of the classroom.