BOOK: “The Music Environment for All Ages, Montessori Foundations for the Creative Personality”

The Music Environment for All Ages
This blog post contains excerpts from this 44-page book, the text first published in “AMI Journal, Theme Issue: The Montessori Foundations for the Creative Personality.”

This book is a student handout in our AMI 0-3 courses.
—Julia Hilson, AMI Board Member and teacher trainer

Introduction
The natural urge to sing, dance, make and listen to music wells up from the depths of each person, from birth to death. It can be stamped out at an early age or it can be fostered to enrich all of life. This article describes how important music is to us at every time in our life, from birth to death. But, what is music? What words can successfully describe it? We might as easily try to capture all the most poignant sights, sounds, and smells of childhood holiday celebrations into a single black and white collection of letters on a piece of paper. We may not know how to describe music, but we do know that we don’t want our children to miss out on it. (Page 3) Continue reading

More . . . Montessori in Romania Fall 2022

A MONTESSORI SCHOOL CONSULTATION
The night before the official Montessori work Simona and I drove high into the hills overlooking the city to visit the beautiful The Romanian orthodox Cetățuia Monastery. It was a quiet, still, starry night and no one was around, but when we entered there was a service going on, just a few monks taking turns reciting prayers, all dark except for a few candles and candelabras glowing the icons on the walls. It was very much like a blessing of the work. Continue reading

A Prayer for the Earth – A Stephenson Family Creation

1 praying

To see the YouTube video
CLICK: PRAYER

This song was written and the video created by the Stephenson family years ago. We are sharing it again because it is becoming more and more important to pray for our earth. Our son, Michael Olaf, is singing and playing the music. Susan took the pictures. The lyrics are by all of us. There are pictures from my Montessori work in Bhutan, Holland, India, Israel, Nepal, Palestine, Russia, Sikkim, Sweden, Thailand, and Tibet. Continue reading