Montessori At Home

What is Montessori?

For those who are familiar with the methods of Maria Montessori, many of you have noticed I certainly have a Montessori flare in my parenting and teaching style. That may be due to how I was raised (my mom also loved Montessori philosophies) combined with my love for early childhood education. Three of my children have attended a Montessori school and we plan to send my fourth one when he is old enough.

Montessori philosophies support child-led interests and encourage a very child-friendly environment so the child can naturally and instinctually grow, learn and develop. If you’re unfamiliar with these methods and want to learn more, I would highly recommend starting with the Hapa Family Blog Channel on YouTube. Even though I learned a few things in college, practiced some of it in the field, observed my children a little in school…I felt like I learned the very most from watching her videos because I was at a stage where I could immediately implement things into our own home. Some people get very particular about how Montessori is done, but that is definitely not the case in our home. We just pull a few ideas from here and a little from there and make it work into our lives. There are a lot of things I could go into, but I am going to keep it short and sweet today and link some of our favorite items to utilize.

Favorite Books

My mom gave me her copy of “Teaching Montessori In The Home.” She used it for me and my siblings growing up. My printing is from 1968, but the updated version is still popular today. I’ve also heard really good things about The Montessori Toddler and am looking forward to the upcoming release of The Montessori Home.

Child-Friendly Life Skills Items

For practical life skills we love having a child-size pitcher. We keep that and all our child-size plates, bowls, and silverware in a bottom drawer in our kitchen so it’s easy for the kid’s to get their own items to eat with. I used to have plastic utensils and plates, but, after all the kid’s fighting over colors and the utensils not working very well, we finally invested in Corelle (which doesn’t break) and small utensils that actually cut and pick up your food. When our kid’s transition out of high chairs they start eating at their little kid table (click here to read more about our tables) and this is a great time to teach them how to get their own plates and utensils. We do follow the one cup method and every child has an assigned colored cup we fill with water each day. For milk or other drinks they use our glass cups which we keep up higher. This really helps cut down on how many cups we could go through with five people home all day. The kids are often involved in food prep and these child-safe knives are also something we frequently use (my two year old and my five year old use these. My 8 year old girls use a semi-dull regular kitchen knife and after years of practice are very comfortable with it.

It’s also a great time to help them begin using spray bottles to clean up after themselves and wipe down their little table. As they grow older, we have used lots of different ways to help teach them how to clean and tidy and the best items I’d recommend for this is the Dyson vacuum (I linked Amazon, but if you have a Costco we got it on sale for around $300 I believe) and child-size brooms or dust mops. We also have this cute toddler broom set, but I ended up moving it to our play area, because the kid’s mostly just use the vacuum and an old adjustable dust mop that we already had.

Academic Favorites

Now, if you homeschool and are apart of My Tech High, for our learning materials we have used our MTH funds (click here to read more about that) to purchase all of our Montessori items because, yes, they can get a little pricy. Now that I am eight years into motherhood I really wished I had spent less money on plastic junk and invested in some of these longer lasting items from the beginning. I often felt like we didn’t have the money for these items, but in hindsight if I added up all the money we’ve spent on junky toys and materials, I probably would’ve saved money by just buying fewer, simpler and nicer materials and toys long-term. So, if you’re a younger mom - learn from my mistake (like the plastic dishes)! Less really is more sometimes. We’ve been trying to simplify some of the items in our household because it makes it easier for us and the kid’s to maintain - which also falls along the lines of Montessori philosophies.

If I had to narrow down my Montessori favs for learning, I would probably have to go with either the sandpaper letters (manuscript and cursive) or the moveable alphabet and the word mat that goes with it. We get a lot of use out of all of those. Right now, my five year old is using the number board a lot alongside his math curriculum and we recently added these CVC word rods to help him as he learns how to read and spell. We use this tray for 3 part cards which, really isn’t necessary in my opinion but you can also use this tray for other things. The kid’s do love when I pull out this sand tray to practice handwriting though. And speaking of fine motor, my boys also use this screwdriver board. And, for toddlers who are just beginning to show interest in cutting, I would highly recommend using these looped scissors because they strengthen and prepare their muscles for a smoother transition to regular scissors. The first signs they are ready to begin learning how to cut is when they can use loop scissors to cut the ends of a piece of paper which is usually around age 2.5-3 years old.

Montessori Mats are super helpful in helping teach children how to define and maintain their work spaces. These are the ones I have and we have the 27x43 size.

And, along those lines, we use the mats most often with playing and our learning shelves. (Botany learning shelf pictured) I wrote about our Halloween 2020, Valentines 2021, All About Me, Apples, and Christmas 2021 learning shelves if you need some more inspiration ideas. I use a variety of containers and trays for our learning shelves, but we mostly use these baskets and some cheap IKEA trays that are no longer available.

The Montessori Geography puzzles are great items for pre-school and older children. We bought our US puzzle off Amazon and the world one off Montessori Outlet. Montessori Outlet is by far cheaper, but we didn’t have a good experience with them so I probably wouldn’t recommend buying through them unless you really need to save the money. Our order literally took almost 3 months versus the Amazon two days prime shipping. But, either way, I’d recommend control maps to go with them as it really helps the kids as they assemble the puzzles. The puzzle pieces are also fun to use to trace for other projects.

Let me know if you have any other questions! I’m always showing these items on IG and how we use them so be sure to follow along if you aren’t.