The Montessori Inspired Classroom: Part I

I have a love to profess. It is Menards.  Yes Menards the hardware store.  EXCELLENT customer service, reasonable prices, and the willingness to cut wood for me for FREE is what I love about them.  So, combining Menards with Earth Day is only a natural progression.  (I know, I know, Earth Day was weeks ago.  My life has been mad busy lately, so I am backlogged on my 20,000 additional celebration freebies and my Earth Day blog post.  Everything is still on its way.)

A while back, I purchased about $2.00 worth of wood remnants from Menards.  Did you know that they meticulously cut every piece for me.  And, they did it with a smile!  

Montessori schools are known for using wooden toys, storage containers, etc.  That deeply inspired my desire to figure out how to use the wood pieces for school use.  Below are pics of what I did with some of the wood pieces.  There are also pics of other earth friendly classroom ideas.

Use wood remnants from the discount pile of a hardware store to make prefix, suffix, root, and base word blocks.  A hardware store will often cut the blocks for you for free.

Rocks make great math manipulatives and are everywhere!

Use a mini chalkboard and chalk to identify learning center stations and student groups.

Using letter stickers, place prefixes on one block and base words onto another block.

Students create new words by moving around blocks to match prefixes and suffixes with base words and roots.