Listing of AMI 'Communications' 

Contents

A Message from Renilde Montessori

What Kept Me in AMI
Bob Portielje

Contrasting Land and Water Forms
The Method in Practice
Camillo Grazzini

Annual General Meeting of the Association Montessori Internationale
Agenda and Venue

Nominations for the AMI Board

Secretarial Report for 1999

International Year for the Culture of Peace
Letter to the Members

Obituary: M.A. Paolini
A Life Devoted to Montessori

Moral Development
Peter Gebhardt-Seele

The Four Planes of Education (an extract)
Maria Montessori

23rd International Montessori Congress, Cancún
Elisabeth Houweling

The Mind and the Hand
Silvia Carbone-Singh

Question and Answer
Transition from Casa to Elementary

International Centre for Montessori Studies Foundation
Forty Years of History
Camillo Grazzini

Announcements

 Listing of AMI 'Communications' 

Highlights from 'Communications 2000/1'

What Kept Me in AMI
Bob Portielje, President

A sneaking feeling of an inevitable 'divorce' has come over me; after about forty years of an ever-growing involvement in the Montessori movement, first locally and nationally, which was soon to become internationally, now has come the time for goodbyes. Quite disturbing, believe me! It is an odd thought to realise that this coming September an unforgettable and fascinating part of my life will end. For nearly half my lifetime it has been my privilege to meet so many exceptional and outstanding people from all over the world, many of whom have become personal friends of Djoeke and myself. I emphatically include my 'Mrs. President': without her continued support, assistance and participation the relationship AMI-Bob Portielje would have been utterly impossible.

What kept me in Montessori all these years? Briefly it is, I believe, a mixture of loyalty, love and the feeling of a Montessori parent who wished to do something in return, grateful for Montessori education .

From my letter in Communications 4, 1999 it is crystal clear that my faith in AMI's future is utterly justified, with Renilde Montessori as President, Hilla Patell as Chair of the Executive Committee and Mary Hayes as General Secretary.

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From 'Contrasting Land and Water Forms' (the Method in Practice) by Camillo Grazzini

The article, which includes revised and refined definitions for the Land and Water Forms as approved by the AMI Pedagogical Committee, offers clear and concise information on the appropriate materials. It has many useful suggestions as to classroom activities and has an extremely well-documented note section. The article is relevant to both the primary and the elementary levels and is well worth reading.

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This year has been proclaimed the International Year for the Culture of Peace (IYCP) by the United Nations. Manifesto 2000 is an appeal for individual commitment that was drafted by a group of Laureates of the Nobel Prize for Peace. The aim is to collect and present one hundred million signatures to the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 2000. This is to be achieved with the help of all identified partners, which includes AMI.

Through the website address below, you can add your electronic signature and thus contribute to AMI's partnership in this operation.

http://www2.unesco.org/manifesto2000/default.asp?par=NGO/INT/055/AIM

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Dr. Peter Gebhardt-Seele earned a Ph.D. from the Erlangen-Nürnberg University and a high school teacher's certificate in Bavaria, Germany. He holds an AMI special education diploma from Aktion Sonnenschein, Munich and an AMI elementary diploma from the Washington Montessori Institute, Washington D.C. He has followed the AMI Training of Trainers Programme and presently directs the AMI elementary summer course at MIA &emdash; the Montessori Internationales Ausbildungszentrum, Munich, Bavaria (Germany). His book The Computer and the Child, a Montessori Approach has been published by the Computer Science Press, Rockville, Maryland. We quote from the preface of Dr. Gebhardt-Seele's article on 'Moral Development'...

"The moral issue touches on the deepest philosophical issues. It cannot be treated fully in a text of this size but I hope that this analysis will clarify the fundamental issue. I will discuss three areas:

• The knowledge of what is good.
• The will to choose what is good.
• The freedom to act upon that will."

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Mrs. Silvia Carbone-Singh holds the AMI diplomas for the Assistant to Infancy and Primary levels. She has taken courses at Bank Street School of Education and New York University towards an Early Childhood Certificate. At the National University (UNAM), Mexico she completed a course, Exploring the Brain, for children with special needs. She became an AMI trainer for the Assistants to Infancy level in 1993. Since 1995, she is the Director of Training at the Instituto Montessori de México A.C.

In her article 'The Mind and the Hand' Mrs. Carbone-Singh discusses the close relationship between language, thought, mind, and intelligence. As she points out, 'Montessori herself, when talking of the hand (Absorbent Mind, Chapters 14, 15) always united hand and word, hand and language.' (...)

..."If the hand therefore thinks, if the hand has been able to build, to create music, painting, science, then how should the child educate his hands? The child is not born with a special ability, he has to learn and develop. During the first year, the child's brain is building its structures and function step by step following the maturation of the nervous system. Only when a certain maturation in the nervous system has occurred, can the child move his hands and his thumb in opposition to the index finger. When the hand of the child is able to move intentionally then its education begins. The child uses his hand in the environment to imitate the movement of the adult.

Maria Montessori also talks about the child's tendency to imitate. She says that this imitation is not passive because the child first internalises the movement he sees, then processes it and finally expresses it in his own movement." ...

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This issues' Question and Answer section on Transition from Casa to Elementary offers some insights and invites further dialogue with the readership.

Your questions for this section of Communication are welcome. You can send them to us by e-mail, fax or letter. The deadlines for inclusion in Communications for the rest of this year are: May 15 for no. 2/3 and September 1 for no. 4