Updates from the Age of Montessori Team
It is hard to believe that the year is almost ending. It has been a year of major milestones and good hard work for us at Age of Montessori. We have been working with our students from around the world in three credit and two non-credit courses. We gained our national MACTE accreditation, got Mary Ellen’s second book published (Nurturing Your Child’s Inner Life), and Randall and Mary Ellen are busy visiting interns and accepting speaking engagements around the world.
Recently, I took some pictures around our office that I thought you might enjoy. We’ll start with the setting…the beautiful snow-capped mountains we look out our office windows to see.
Here is our team who happened to be at the office that day…
Here we are working on plans for 2013.
From left to right: Mary Ellen Maunz, Program Director; Randall Klein, Assistant Director of Training;
Tani Kingston, Executive Director; Deborah Lynch, Technical, Social Media Manager
Kim McPhee, our Registrar
Here is Accreditation Facilitator Karen Campbell.
Tani and I spent ten days in late October and the beginning of November in St. Petersburg, Russia. We were invited to speak to the Department of Psychology at Saint Petersburg State University. It was an honor and a privilege to address these warm and open-minded people. In the audience were Montessori teachers, early childhood educators, psychology students and their professors. A group also came from Moscow and the State Orphanage System. It was a dynamic couple of days of introducing Montessori and deepening the understanding of those who already knew something of her transformational message about the potential of the child to create lasting peace.
Here is Tani giving her presentation.
Here I am after the presentation with many of the students.
In the days before the university presentations, we visited several of the schools where I trained the teachers in previous visits. The elementary children spoke some English and were excited to have me tell them all about Halloween. Look at these sweet children. 
On our last evening we went to the famed Mariinsky Theater and saw the opera Aida. It was a magnificent production. We had a little fun taking pictures of one another before the production began.
Behind me are the front boxes and the edge of the magnificent stage curtain. Up there behind Tani is the Czar’s box. (Not sure who sits there now….) If you can believe it, this was the 230th season of this beautiful theater. It is the home of the famed Kirov Ballet.
It has been a fruitful year and it is not over yet! We hope your year has been full of good things as well. We wish a Happy Holiday Season and extend the love of our hearts to all of you. Thank you for joining us on the Montessori road!
