15+ Montessori Inspired Explorations for Three Year Olds

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Our Montessori days become more and more filled with learning and exploration. I aim to dedicate at least one hour each day to support my daughter is working with activities from our learning shelves. She recently turned three, and her inquisitive mind draws her naturally to it. I always try to respect her choices in activities, sometimes, I take her by the hand, we walk to the shelf, and I offer her a selection of two activities she hasn’t chosen on her own. My goal is to work with her on each task until she is ready to do it without assistance.

About once a week I rotate materials on our learning shelves and create new learning opportunities. I would love to share with you our favourite explorations. We only recently got our first bunch of Montessori materials and started to incorporate them into our preschool Montessori environment.

This memory game was the most attractive exercise. Very simple, yet requires so much concentration. We play this game with the colour cards (colour tablets) and Noah’s Ark Animals.

Here’s how to do it:

a child takes all the animals out of the basket in random order
then he or she finds matching animals and places them next to each other
one of each animal is placed in a mystery bag, one in the basket
the basket with animals can be placed in another room
a child puts a hand in a mystery bag trying to guess the animal he or she is holding (can do it with a blindfold), pulls it out, and places it on a mat
then he or she goes and brings the matching animal
repeat for the rest of the animals.

We started to learn numerals with The Sandpaper numbers using The Three Period Lesson. Watch the presentation here.

The Metal insets became very popular soon after appearing on the shelf. You can watch the presentation here.

As I predicted the Cylinder blocks are impossible to walk by. We have been working on extensions and soon will start to use a blindfold to bring an extra challenge to it. Here is a straightforward presentation of the Cylinder blocks lesson.

Here’re some examples of learning explorations I have out for my three-year-old child.

We love using Montessori principles in our home. It’s nothing short of a genius. When seeing Montessori magic unfold in my child, I get motivated to do more and dig deeper.