Montessori Albums - Primary, Elementary, Infancy

Montessori albums - album pages - album write-ups - huh? What ARE all of these people talking about? Are they doing some sort of scrapbooking in Montessori training?

And where do we get the lesson plans for doing the Montessori activities? The Montessori curriculum?

Aha! It's all the same!

When a person goes to a fully certified Montessori training course, they receive each presentation as an actual presentation - the instructor generally uses a trainee from the course group and shows the student the work at hand as if the trainee were a child in that age range. Everyone else observes.

The student then goes back to their seat and the instructor goes through the presentation step-by-step, discussing points when needed, while the trainees (furiously) write or type out as much as they possibly can.

When they go home that evening, they type it all up, or re-format it so it's pretty; add illustrations - either photographs or drawings or artwork or a combination; along with the 20 or so other presentations received that day.

These are each called an "album page."

As album pages are compiled into their respective albums, there becomes an album for each subject area:

• Primary - Exercises of Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Mathematics (and Theory)
• (some trainings will break out art, geography, and some sciences; most AMI trainings keep these areas interspersed among the four *key* albums)
• Elementary - Mathematics, Language, Geography, Biology, Music, Geometry, History
• (yes geometry is separated from the mathematics; geography includes astronomy and geology; biology includes zoology and botany; and yes some trainings split things out and some combine things back together - ie art in this case)

The album pages are reviewed by "readers" and corrections are made. The final corrections are assembled into the albums, which are decorated as the trainee sees fit. They then go for a final reading before the trainee studies for their final exams.

See now why so many Montessori-trained people like to stick to their albums so much? They are full works of art, blood may have gone into creating them! and certainly a lot of time, energy, sweat, and tears went into their creation.

And they still end up with typos! Sigh ;)

Now - are you looking for something to download online? There are many options available (one post couldn't hold the entire list of options!) - both paid and free; purchase hard-copy or download a file of them.

Looking to do complete or almost all Montessori? What you *really* want is to get all the albums from the same place, so that they are cohesive.

If you're just looking to supplement a particular topic within a subject, individual album pages are perfect for you. If you're looking to do most or all of an entire subject, you'll want to get the entire album from one place. There are enough differences that the discrepancies become HUGE when you are pulling information from so many different sources.

Yes, the Montessori philosophy is the same, but you want a cohesiveness to the materials and the presentations, and since there *is* some wiggle room, downloading an entire subject (let's say Math) from 5 different sources is going to prove more frustrating and time-consuming that it needs to be.

So pick one or two, and stick with it. You'll be happy you did! The process of material gathering will be simplified, where to put each presentation, what materials can overlap, and which you need to duplicate.

Keys of the Universe has complete elementary Montessori albums, online support, a choice of "course lengths", is affordable ($20/month or $40/month), and is flexible if you need to take time off, or just want to hold off on the next sets, or need to do so for budget reasons.  Plus you get the permanent discussion community so that if you have any questions or concerns, you have access at any time. Come visit!