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!

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