Making Montessori materials

In a Montessori classroom, there are 4 kinds of materials, as I see it. There are the Montessori materials, such as the beads, knobbed cylinders, etc that you can buy from Montessori suppliers (such as my favourite Tower High Learning). There are materials for art and craft that are chosen by the teacher. There are things found out and about in nature by the children, plants, classroom animals, etc (if you can call them materials) and finally all of the teacher-made laminated material.

The teacher-made material is really a labour of love. You have to print it out, laminate, and then cut... Or you have to print it out, cut it, mount it on card, cut it, laminate it, cut it. I have even found out today that teachers then round the corners (for safety and durability purposes)! And it is not just the odd thing. There are language materials (and some people use the pink, blue and green approach which is a LOT of materials), classification and nomenclature cards, booklets, geography cards, folders, information, history cards - yep... pretty much for every area of the curriculum.

At the moment, the main printables we need are continent folders (and related geography cards), social classified cards (pictures only), related object matching cards, biological classification booklets with sorting cards to go with them, nomenclature cards (biological, scientific, geographic, geometric), life cycle cards and booklets, cultural folders (4 sets of cards, sounds OK, but one set is a set of 10 pictures for every country on a continent, for every continent! needless to say we are not going that far with that material making!). We also need land and water form folders, art folders, biome folders. LOTS to do!

So, at the weekends at the moment, I am making materials. Here are some of the ones I have made. Doesn't look a lot, but has taken me 2 long afternoons to print, laminate and cut. Some have been cut, mounted, laminated, cut!

I purchased Geography Folder materials from Montessori Print Shop, printed, mounted and laminated them. They are stored in a red envelope which I also laminated for durability.

To go along with the continent folders (I have only made Europe so far!) I have these 'Our Global Community' books which cover a whole range of topics. These are great and Addie loves her books!

I love these cards, which are Children of World cards from I Believe in Montessori. Addie looked at these today, and absolutely loves them. She thinks that the girl in the top left is Jay, because of the freckles and colour of hair (although Jay's is a lot darker than that!). Each card has the continent that child is from on the front, matching the Montessori continent colours, and on the reverse I have written the country the child is from. This is currently a free giveaway from this site.

 I have also made some continents cards and I have finished laminating and cutting European landmark cards. I have laminated, and yet to cut, the landmark cards from the other continents.

I have made the Biological Classifications booklets, and added this series of Living Things books to go with it to reinforce the concept of all of these booklets. These are also great books!

I also have a couple of plant lifecycle cards I have made, but I will show these in another post coming soon(ish)!

I love having materials like these on the shelves. I just wish I had more time to make materials, and I have a very long list of the ones I need to make!

Wish me luck!