Poetry, Albanesi Educational Center

Poetry is a form of communication and creative expression. It is undeniably an art. Children are delighted and amazed at the auditory treat that poems bring to their lives. The Albanesi Educational Center Poetry Exercises material has allied poetry and components from the Montessori curriculum in a marvelous manner.
When children are familiar with the content of a poem, they are able to distinguish and absorb the natural flow and the mechanics of the poem, without formal instruction. The rhythms, rhymes, assonance, alliteration, tone, all become clear to their ears.
The vocabulary in the poems is extremely enriching and accessible to new readers in an elementary classroom. The vocabulary contains familiar and sophisticated words, and several grammatical components that children do not encounter often enough. The texts provide exposure to irregular past participles (forgotten, drawn), compound adjectives (four-legged, long-necked, duck-billed), and all tenses are represented as well.

Each set contains 4 texts cards. Each of the four text cards contains about 2 stanzas (paragraph).
Each stanza is comprised of 4 verses (lines), which we call a quatrain.
Each quatrain contains 2 rhymes (peak/beak) or 2 slant rhymes (cake/slate).
Each poem follows different rhyme schemes (see picture below).

The Poetry Exercises Set is comprised of:
14 booklets and set of cards contained in a pouch
Each booklet contains 4 illustrations and 4 pages of poetry on the following themes:
#1 Cats
#2 Communication
#3 Musical Instruments
#4 Elephants
#5 Pyramids
#6 Homes
#7 Special Clothing
#8 Egg-laying Animals
#9 Sea Animals
#10 Spiders
#11 Dinosaurs
#12 Snakes
#13 Armored Animals
#14 Whales

The Poetry booklets are part of Junior Elementary Language Lab, a comprehensive Montessori language program for children 6 to 9.

Each set is comprised of a booklet, a cover page, 4 illustrations cards, and 4 poetry cards.

After reading the poem, children can arrange the cards in a linear fashion. The cards are aligned, from left to right, from top to bottom. This will allow children to recall the poem, and sequence it. The illustrations serve to connect readers to the poetry.

Other analytical tasks can be offered to children to work on the syntactic and semantic parts of the poem. The Albanesi Educational Center provides a series of “exercises cards” that aims to provide extensive work on this material.

In conclusion, Poetry Exercises from The Albanesi Educational Center is a adaptation of Dr. Montessori original project called “Reading Booklets,” which aims to lead children to reading through writing. These short poetic booklets can serve a variety of purposes such as matching work (poems to illustrations), dictation work, and memorization work.
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