The Complete List of Questions from Prague

Question 1: 
How do you see “assistants to Infants” aid in the work of birth and the first moments of a child’s life- both now and in the future?

Question 2: 
How can we convince and influence doctors and nurses about the importance of being attentive at birth?

Question 3: 
I am interested in observation of newborns. Where can I learn more of newborns?

Question 4: 
How can I order copies of the Quaderno Montessori?


Question 5: 
Is it possible to come to Italy to study children under three years of age?

Question 6: 
Do you offer courses or visits? Can you give me more information about your projects?

Question 7: 
How can we get a training to South Australia? Please let me know when the course in Italy comes together.

Question 8: Are there additional seminars for people who graduated from AMI Assistance to Infancy courses in order to widen and deepen their knowledge?

Question 9: 
Can you please briefly guide me to find out more about the aspect about the observations regarding the genes and the stages that all the children all over the world goes through regarding the comment by Grazia “written in their genes”?




Question 10: 
Where can I get a 0-3 Assistant to Infancy training, one that really goes into depth about the importance of Observation, Respect, Protection, Stepping back?

Question 11: 
How can we get these videos to our parents and other staff members who are not here? The children we see here [in the Cosmic Task videos] are normalized. Infancy goes so fast that it seems normalization has no time to occur. Any words of advice on this regard?

Question 12: 
Such amazing work, now how can we bring it to parents in the 21^st century?

Question 13: 
When you announce the crowdfunding video project will you contact me? I’d be happy to contribute.






Question 14: 
Could you please address the balance between sensorimotor, open, heuristic activities, and purpose driven activities of practical life, and keeping “material” order and “neatness” of the environment, especially how we introduce/present this?





Question 15: 
I love the “heuristic play” and to watch it unfold. How does it fit into the Nido (3 months to 15 months), especially in an AMI classroom that is only to have items from the guides’ albums and trainings?

Question 16: 
What is your opinion about role playing before 6 years old?


Question 17: 
How to understand the norm for number of materials in the toddler class? At our AMI course we were taught that large amounts of materials distract the child’s attention.

Question 18: 
At our course we were taught that all the activity in the toddler’s group should be real. This is important to give the child under 3 years of age the culture and to become and belong to his time and place? So can we say that pouring beans or grains activities for children under 3 are aimless activities? Don’t we in this way tell the children unreal things? Maybe pouring activities should be included in other activity which has an aim?


Question 19: 
Montessori emphasized the importance of “completion of the cycle of activity” in purposeful work. The activities of exploration (featured in the film) are purposeful, for the children’s creativity and critical thinking, but why not give them “real things” and “real work” which will accomplish the same goal and offer real life experiences that they see adults do?

Question 20: 
I am an AMI Montessori trained teacher for 0-3, working in a toddler environment. In our training we learned about the standard Montessori materials, but the open ended materials I saw in the videos were not mentioned. For me, this seemed more like a play-based learning facility. I am curious about how we can integrate this kind of material in our environment.

Question 21: 
I had understood that children in 1-3 environment should not have pouring exercises or spooning exercises as these should be in the Practical Life area of 3-6, however the film showed such materials in use (not for actual drinking but as an exercise). Can you please elaborate?








Question 22:  
How do you see the current Assistants to Infancy training /work needs to change (or not) after your observations and experiences in Italy?