So, last week I took delivery of a very large box of Montessori materials from the lovely Anne-Marie from Child Led Chaos. And this week I started to get the resources out.
The first one out of the box was the Trinomial Cube (amazon)
As soon as she’d got the hang of the binomial, she wanted to do the big cube. So we had a few goes at that.
I foresee many more hours with that one 🙂
And before all this had started, of course we had to clean down the table after breakfast, and sweep the kitchen floor so that it’s clean for the mat to be rolled out. Lots of incidental good habits in Montessori practices. After only a couple of days of it, she already rolls the mat up and puts it away without being reminded.
Tigerboy is loving all the new stuff as well. He’s spent a lot of time with the Latches Board (amazon)
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of materials, but already, just a couple of days into use, I can see that both the little ones are responding so well to having the montessori influence brought into the home. It gives me a structure as well, which is good, and I’m really looking forward to reorganising the living room, so that we can have shelving with the materials available for easy access. For the time being, I’m getting them out early on a morning and putting them on the kitchen table, which means the children have to ask me for them, not ideal, but a lot better than having Tigerboy disappear with an important part!
If you’d like to read more about montessori, try our homemade spindle box or a post about Montessori methods and the materials
The trinomial cube (and the coloured cylinders) were the only ones that got a lot of use here (not that we ever did it properly), as you can probably tell from all the chips! It needs a bit of touching up probably. It was a hard to let go (silly brain!), but I’m overjoyed now I see it being loved more than we ever did. Thank-you for buying it all from me, it makes me so happy seeing it *used* instead of sitting in a box 🙂
I do understand that letting go thing (she says, stepping over piles of stuff) and yes, it is easier when you know things are being loved in their new home. To be honest, the fact that the cube is already a little used makes me much less precious about the two year old investigating it, which is a good thing!
We put the latches board on the beanster’s birthday list & she loves it. She has stacking cups but not so keen on the stacking aspect!
I think I am going to splash out on a pink tower and broad stair at some point when we’ve rearranged the room and I’ve got somewhere for them to live. So many extension things that you can do with them when you’ve got both.
We had a version of the wooden nesting tower! (Ours had 11 boxes and each had a picture of a farm animals on five sides.) We loved it and I never realized it was Montessori. I gave it away to the local charity bazaar last spring.