Saturday, March 12, 2011

Montessori Materials

We have dabbled in Montessori for quite some time. I've made many materials by hand and from what I can find at thrift stores and dollar stores. I have also been blessed with a mother who had given the kids some Montessori materials for Christmas to help us along. It's been quite a journey and I am so happy to say we are finally able to have our own dedicated shelves in our dedicated school/play room.

Here is one week of our shelves. I am blessed to be able to take Karen Tyler's class that I won on a blog giveaway and I am understanding more and changing up the shelves a bit right now. As soon as I get those up and running I'll post some new pictures. But this was two weeks ago. Not al of these are Montessori, but most are.

Here is our Montessori work shelf. It's a regular bookshelf that I drilled more holes in and cut boards to fit so we could fit more in the space.


This s our top shelf. We have paper in the drawers: used one side, new paper and coloring pages), moving and matchmaking stacking rings, and our pink tower that isn't pink.


A great way for us to learn Spanish with Education Cubes



Sound box with sandpaper letters and various objects to match. You can see this in action here.


YDD doing transfer activity with wood stars and soup spoon.

You can see the spoon better here.



Clothespin activity



Tying activity- especially needed since they have no shoes that tie!

Lacing activity(re did the set up later to reflect more montessori style- having the beads in a bowl and the laces in a bowl



Spooning activity Beads from one bowl to the next. They made a neat sound hitting the china bowl (Thrift store)




Using tweezers and pom poms. One to one correspondence (math) being learned here as well as working on coordination and strengthening the pencil grip fingers (pre-writing). All of this with a fun activity my 22 month old does over and over!


Montessori is fun and simple to set up. We really enjoy it and the kids are learning and having a blast!

2 comments:

  1. I have that same white paint palette that we use pompoms with too! Only my dd kept trying to eat the pompoms so it has been put away for a bit. LOL. Looks great I wish I knew more about montessori as I love the theory and hands on but don't have any $$ to really get it started or room to store things so it looks clean and neat on a shelf.

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  2. Maria- I'm glad you like it!

    Mrs. Mandy- It's fun to see what other people are doing too! If you daughter is trying to eat the pom pom you might try something like o's cereal that is ok to eat. She is still getting the concept of one to one correspondence- and then she eats it!
    It doesn't take a lot of money- just a lot of being a ware and going to thrift stores, and peoples basements! REALLY! I'm going to do a post where I list my favorite thrifty sites! I'll try to do that soon! I did Montessori when we had 800 square feet and 5 people. It IS Possible! You just have to be creative! It sure is nice having a bit more space though!

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