Make Your Own Montessori Materials

While Montessori materials, objects and equipment are undeniably beautiful, they’re also very expensive and out of reach for so many people.

Yes, you get what you pay for, but I’m sure you can also use top quality materials and make your own. So, I’m on a mission, to make our own Montessori equipment.

I’ll add to this as I make things or think of things I could make and will hopefully end up with a good set of tutorials for making your own Montessori style bits and pieces at home.

  1. Make your own Sensory Bags
  2. Make your own Dressing Frames : in-progress

Make Your Own Montessori Materials Part 1 : Sensory bags

This will be an ongoing activity I feel, we’ll build our collection as fabric and textures present themselves.

These are so easy to make that I had my 20 month old son help me. He picked out the fabric and helped me fill them up too.

Here’s how to make a basic square beanbag the simple novice (as I am) way:

  1. Choose a fabric (we have animal fur, canvas, silk, cotton so far) and cut a rectangle (the desired width of your finished square plus a hem x twice the length).
  2. Fold it in half with right sides facing each other (so the right sides are inside your square)
  3. Sew around the edge of two of the open sides, leaving one open side free for turning inside out and filling
  4. Turn the square inside out so that the right sides are now on the outside
  5. Fill with whatever you fancy, we used different sizes of beans and peas, lentils, barley and some crinkly plastic packaging I’d just taken off something, other ideas are sand, rice and I’m sure many more (please comment below with other suggestions!), making sure you leave plenty of space to sew up the final side,
  6. Fold the final open side in on itself and if you’re a good sewer then you can invisible sew it closed. I’m not, plus I don’t have bags of time (I did mention I was being helped by a toddler too!), so I simply sew along the edge to secure.
  7. If you have something like sand inside I’d be temped to top sew the entire bag for extra security.

Repeat for lots more. I then made a little drawstring bag for them all to go inside and sewed a few padded squares on the front using material I’d used for actual squares.

Et voila! A Sensory bag!

Montessori-inspired Sorting Game for Toddlers

After the failure of our coloured pasta for using tongs for the first time, they were just too tricky to pick up, I got to thinking what would be a better first item and out came the pom poms!

An instant hit and Chops (20 months old) got to grips with the tongs in no time.

I lay out three glass ramekins, the little plastic tongs and a pile of pompoms in three colours and various sizes. I showed him what to do, how to pick up and put a pompom into the dish, then let him get on with it.

Then I suggested sorting the pompoms by colour into the three dishes and off he went and sorted them all into the three dishes!

The dribble bib was saturated, always a sign that there’s been a lot of concentration going on :)

I was too engrossed in this new game to take a picture but it won’t be the last time we play so will add one later!

Now he’s mastered the tongs there’s a whole World of fun we can add to our daily activities, exciting times ahead.

Coloured pasta

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We tried rainbow rice, Chops just wanted to eat it or dump it all on the floor, now I thought we’d try some rainbow pasta!

Making it is SO easy, just put some dried pasta (different shapes if you have them, to add some variety) into a plastic food baggy, add a teaspoon of vinegar and a good few drops of food colouring and mix it all up. Spread the pasta out into a single layer (still in the bag if you don’t want to get a tray messy) and let it dry.

By fluke I discovered that adding paste food colouring to the vinegar and mixing that well before adding to the pasta was much better and I didn’t end up adding too much liquid like I did the blue, which resulted in soggy pasta bits!

I had intended this to be our first Montessori-inspired sorting game with tongs and pots to sort them into but the shapes I used were too tricky to pick up with the kitchen tongs!

My Babies

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I love it when chops snuggles up to Wriggles in his sleep, I can only see that this can help bonding, it certainly won’t do any harm.

But go away heartburn! I could actually be sick with it right now, but with a toddler lying on me and not being within arms reach of a Rennie, there’s nowt I can do!

Toddler bonding with baby during pregnancy

I’m lying here grinning in a way only a parent grins as my unborn child kicks my toddler as he sleeps on my tummy.

It seems since Chops has been aware of the baby, he often sleeps with his head on my growing bump, the first time he did it I admit I had a bit of a moment when Wriggles reacted to his snoring/heartbeat by really flipping around in there, it was the most amazing, heartwarming moment that my two children were almost united for the first time, a moment I will never forget.

Since then it’s happened a lot, Chops will lay his head on bump in his sleep and Wriggles will react instantly, like they know he’s there. It got us thinking about their bonding and it really must help that deep connection.

So much fun ahead for our little family, it’s amazing to think that two and a half years ago we didn’t think we would ever have children (I have PCOS) and here we are halfway through our pregnancy with our second child! Int life brilliant?

Tonsilitis

What a week it’s been. Last Saturday, chops became feverish and not himself at all, we were at Granny’s house 100 miles away from home, 24 hours later, he woke from his nap on me at home and started shivering (still feverish, nothing was shifting it) then his hands went a purplish blue so we took him to A&E straight away. What a relief we did because while in the waiting room he had a febrile convulsion that lasted around a minute, his little body went stiff in my arms and his eyes rolled back in his head. Doctors and Nurses were straight on the case, I was running towards them with him, both of us shouting for someone to help, he had oxygen and came round.

After a few hours there he was diagnosed with tonsilitis, his fever came down and we were sent home with a 5 day course of anti-biotics, the first he’s had in his little life.

On day 3 of anti-bs and full doses of iboprofen and paracetemol his fever went and he returned to his usual self, but up came a rash on his tummy and back. We monitored it for 24 hours, it seemed to improved then got worse again last night so I didn’t give him any more penicillin and took him to the doctor this morning.

His tonsils have got worse and the rash has been diagnosed as either allergic reaction to the penicillin or viral. The really frustrating part, however, and it’s maddening me, is that his tonsilitis is viral and not bacterial therefore anti-biotics were never going to work, meaning he has had anti-biotics for no reason whatsoever.

There we are, what’s done is done. I’ve been told viral tonsilitis lasts around 2 weeks and to give him pain killers, stop the anti-biotics, which I already had.

It’s made ne very aware of how little I know about common illnesses, had I known about viral vs bacterial tonsilitis and that one was not treatable, he might still be pure of antibiotic.

He’s fine in himself, though, so that’s a huge plus point. He’s also sparko on my lap so I’m off to join him in the land of nod.

Sensory play

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We often play with bowls of rice, cereals and pasta, with various sized containers and scoops but rainbow rice will be a permanent feature!

There are loads of methods for making it, I used the one over on Domestic Simplicity.

I got Chops to help shaking up the jars but he lost interest and wandered off after the second lot, it was a big old Sarsons jar so not the easiest to shake wet rice in!

We made yellow, blue, green, red and purple and it looks great. I also added edible glitter to the red and just let that tray air dry, once mixed in there’s a subtle sparkle to it :)

I put it on a big tray in the garden along with some containers, scoop and some straws. It was a hit for 5 minutes until he realised it flew quite well and looked good on the grass. Shortly after, the tray was emptied and he started filling it with soil instead. That was me told!

Playdough

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I’ve got a poorly toddler at the moment, tonsilitis, so time indoors has meant the need for fun activities! What better than Playdough? I tell you what, making your own playdough!

It’s so easy and should last for months in an airtight container, so we made plenty.

Basic recipe (though there are loads out there, some with peanut butter in! I decided not to encourage eating it):

2 cups plain flour
1 cup salt
1 tsp cream of tartar (this is the preservative)
2 cups water with food colouring in
1tbsp cooking oil

Mix it all together in a saucepan and cook on medium heat, stirring constantly until it forms into a dough, remove from the heat and knead! Et voila!