This week on our Montessori Babies Podcast, we had the honor of interviewing an amazing Montessorian and great friend of mine, Jodie Bato. She and I worked together in the classroom setting for many years! She happened to just have finished her AMI Assistants to Infancy Montessori Training! So we got to ask her all about what the AMI Montessori Training entails so we can better understand and evolve our Montessori Practices.
This photo is actually Jodie, myself, and our amazing Infant Teacher Team many years ago during our Baby Halloween festivities at the school we worked at!
The conversation with Jodie was so amazing because we got to share just what we study in the AMI Montessori Training! There are a couple different ways to be trained in Montessori in the United States. Two of the most common Montessori trainings available are the AMI and AMS Montessori Trainings. For the purpose of this discussion, we will be focusing on the AMI Montessori Training.
So the AMI Training happens to be the training that Dr. Maria Montessori created! It is an international certification, meaning there are teachers all over the world with this AMI training. (That’s actually one of the reasons I wanted the AMI Training! I love learning about different cultures and have a huge inner will to explore our world and I love connecting with Montessorians from all over the world!)
Interview on the AMI Montessori Training with Jodie Bato
Jodie: I just received and completed my training. It’s the Assistants to Infancy. So that is 0-3, birth to three years. Beautiful age, my favorite personally! And so throughout the course we are you know, we’re having lectures and having all this practice and it’s all to help us build our own manual, I guess. We have seven albums and they are the aids to psycho sensory motor development, our child neuropsychiatry, home environment, our two community albums. So our infant and toddler community, as well as our Nido community albums and our Psycho-Pedagogy album and our Medicals album.
Learning About Biology
Bianca: I felt like the Medical’s album really brought everything together! The study of just the science behind everything, you know, what’s going on in their brain and their body and how they’re growing and all of that. And, yeah, so fascinating.
Jodie: Yes. And it’s so amazing how, so this medical text is just filled with things about our biology. Right? And it can relate back to everything that Dr. Montessori observed all those years ago before all of the most of this is known. You know, it’s just it’s so amazing.
Bianca: Totally. Were there any facts that surprised you or that really fascinated you or you wanted to look more into?
Jodie: Prenatal was really, really interesting. I love Pregnancy! My sister has been through it multiple times and I have been with her through it and just being on the outside of that was really cool. And it was also really nice because she was pregnant during training, right, so I was able to be like, “oh, this is what your baby’s doing right now where her development is right now and this is what she’s doing”. And it’s so important for us to do this. You know, it was just so fun, so cool.
Bianca: So cycling back to some of the other albums so that the psycho sensory. Can you explain a little bit about that album, Psycho-Sensory?
Psycho-Sensory Album
Jodie: So in Montessori you utilize all these different materials that aid in development. So this album is filled with those, not all but a lot of them. And then so so they’re split up between ages and as well as gross motor versus eye-hand coordination. So that’s what we have in this album. And not only that, but we also have so these albums, for our own personal use. Right? So it’s our reference. So in this album, because it’s relating to the aids for the development, you also have different different resources in it, like hand development handouts that are really helpful reminders of what we’re looking for and why we’re putting out certain these certain aids in our environment, which is so cool.
Bianca: Yeah, that’s so cool! And for those of you who aren’t familiar, if you research online, they might come up under Montessori toys. But the whole idea behind the aids to development is that, you know, we’re optimizing at every single stage of development. We’re trying to hit within that zone and stimulate and hone in on their concentration and all that good stuff.
Jodie: Concentration is the key!
Bianca: Yeah, for sure. Reeling them in with those points of interest! So within the communities. So can you talk a little bit about those albums? Those I love those albums.
Jodie: Yes! Those probably took the longest just because it has all of our instructions for everything. Right? So there are presentations when we’re giving giving a lesson we’re giving a present is presenting the material to the child. And these these two albums have literally step by step by step instructions on how to do it. So which is awesome because you might not have done a presentation for a long time. So it’s nice to go back and kind of read through and make sure you’re doing it right. And when you’re practicing, it’s just it’s such a good reference, so our the first one is our Nido community, which is my community.
The Nido Community
Bianca: So do you mind my asking for our listeners, what is the Nido community? What’s what’s in there?
Jodie: So in the community, so specifically in the album, we talk about not only the presentations, as I was saying, but also the different areas of of your environment. So we have the areas where sleeping area, eating area, area for physical care, just like the bathroom area and that our rest of the classroom things. And then we also have the different elements of the Nido. So the people, the actual space, and the furniture in the space. So what’s really nice about the album is that it helps you to organize your space because we go through training. We’ve learned how to how to arrange the space where things should go, how the people should kind of prepare themselves and help each other and all of those fun things and having them just. In the album and being able to reference back to them is is so useful. Yeah, I love having them and I’m proud of it because you make it yourself. All of these albums were made by me!
Bianca: Yeah. So for a visual for our community out there, these albums are four to five inch thick albums filled with essays, observations, research, everything that we accumulate within our couple of years within this training goes into our albums, which is also why it’s partnered with that Masters program as well. It’s a lot like these things. So, yeah. So they’re big, beautiful resources that we get to always come back to! They’re really lovely. Congrats on finishing!
Jodie: Thank you so much!
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To listen to the entire interview, click below!