"Making Montessori Ours": sensorial

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We are very excited to announce that the first 10 books of our series, "A Practical Guide to Montessori & Homeschooling" is NOW available. As PDF has been our most requested format, we are making it available before it is released in print.

The collection of books exceed 600 pages of content.

Writing this book, as well as connecting with fellow homeschoolers through Making Montessori Ours and our social media sites have been such a pleasure and labour of love. Many of you have written to us throughout the years asking questions that we too searched for at the beginning of our homeschooling journey. Through this series of books, we share what we have learned throughout our home learning adventure with you.

Our home learning experience has brought new and bright discoveries, that continue to fill us with beautiful family moments. This collection of books documents much of this journey, and so much more.

While this book collection is rooted in Montessori, it is also a practical resource for parents, individuals, and homeschoolers that provides information as to how the method supports parents who are following their children on a natural learning journey. This book collection was written to foster the parent-child connection, and with the intent that each individual will use the content in a way that makes sense for them. While this book is not a manual, it will help you understand the basic scope and sequence of the materials. The books focus heavily on the philosophy, parenting, and traditional use of Montessori materials, as this is a fantastic foundation to build from. It is our goal to project a practical view of the materials to support you with forming solutions that are perfect for your family based on the individual needs of you and your children.

All materials are photographed in detail with extensive information and tutorials which include: the traditional function and use of each material; additional support materials that are required for each material including if the material is used later in the curriculum; how do the materials follow your child's development, and what are the alternatives for economical solutions.

It is my hope that this collection of books will answer the vast majority of questions that you may have asked, AND offer a great deal of information regarding a huge range of questions that you never knew you had.

This series of books "A Practical Guide to Montessori & Homeschooling", delivers a clear image of the Montessori philosophy. It offers helpful information that will assist you in creating an accessible and practical Montessori environment within your home, to work in harmony with your child's natural development. Some of you may wish to incorporate many of the materials shown throughout this collection, while others may wish to create an environment completely based on the Montessori philosophy. The Montessori Method at heart is about observing your child as an individual, and creating a lifestyle at home, where your child has the freedom and flexibility to thrive and learn on their own timeline, and through their own interests and passion.

Below is a detailed video preview of this series for you to see a selection of the contents covered in the collection. We have three additional titles that will be added to the collection in the near future.

We have been living with the materials and philosophy in our home for nearly a decade. The very heart and essence of this collection of books are to honour diversity and freedom of choice in the home learning experience. This book, our Blog, and Facebook page are intended to support a peaceful and non-judgemental learning experience that celebrates families and their freedom to create their own home learning story. Your journey may not look like ours which is perfect because it shouldn't; your journey is your own.

We wish you all great love in your journey to making Montessori yours💕

My love of interesting versatile developmental toys started many years ago, initially due to the collection my sister put together for her boys. Later during my work in program development and creating a community/family developmental toy lending library I had so many things in mind that I pictured our future children loving, learning, creating and exploring with.

I thought I would share the favourites that we own and love with you.

There are many varying opinions for toys out there, and we are toy enthusiasts so you will find no judgement here or great toy debate. I firmly believe that in following your child and their passions it will lead you to some amazing choices that are a fantastic fit for them.

The moments I feel that the amount of toys become an issue (speaking for us here) is if I haven't planned storage to house them in a manageable child friendly and accessible way. At times if I get overwhelmed with organization I try to remember that it was I who made these purchases in love.

As our children grow we make toy choices based more specific interests. We have amazing family support who ask us what our children would love in terms of gifts. We also take advantage of great local used sites to find deals on more expensive items like Playmobil. In Canada we also have a discount retailer Winners/Home Sense that often has amazing deals on incredible (often more expensive toys) found at exclusive retailers.

Our children love a range toys, and toys designed for all types of design and construction. They also have a tremendous love of creative and imaginative dramatic play so we have lots of dress up, different types of dolls and figures (especially Playmobil) and puppets. Art and crafting supplies etc.

In this post I will concentrate on our developmental toy collection and our current storage set up in our new (er) family room. We designed and built our family room addition last fall with help from family, friends and neighbours. This was a huge amount of work! In the end we were able to design the room around our needs, and most importantly greatly needed storage. We live in an old historic house that we adore, but storage space had always been an issue. Planning for this space was many years in the making, so it was pretty amazing to see it take form.

On to our our toy favourites! Remember this is a collection that grew over many years with our
children. These are all toys and materials that we own and purchased. None of the toys featured here are paid for product review. The links we will provide are affiliate links that if clicked are at no cost to you, but could result in a small amount to help fund our site. Thank you in advance!

Marble Run

Marble Run is by far one of our most favourite toys to design and build with. It's incredible in all aspects of learning related building concepts like stability, balance, gravity, potential and kinetic energy. It's just amazing. it can be quite challenging for younger builders and we often built with our children. As they grew they experimented with amazing designs on their own.