Creative Ideas for the Montessori Classroom: Early Childhood Edition

I always thought I would be the teacher that plans out everything that happens in the classroom. Montessori teachers know that if you set up the environment for the students, there does not need to be much planning. Plus, if you have a good Scope and Sequence, you can follow that and since your environment is set up already, you have everything in place for your students. 

Now, one of my favorite parts of Montessori is creating fun experiences for my students. Some of those experiences need to have more planning than others. 

A difference I have noticed between Early Childhood and Elementary 1 is that the Kindergarten students I have in the afternoon lose concentration at about 2 pm. The students are really good at picking their work and practicing skills all the way until 2 o’clock.

This is when we will do an activity together. Most days I will look around my classroom and think of fun activities that use the Montessori materials. 

Here are a few learning activities for Early Childhood that I have come up with on the spot.

Note: I do have a foyer that I get to use, but also, if your classroom is big enough, you could do these activities. 

100 Bats One Hundred Board

This is one of the activities that I did plan in advance. One of my favorite things I did as a Montessori child was look for work lists on special days like Easter, Valentine’s Day, etc. My dad (who was my teacher) would hide the work plans for all the students and we would have to find them. 

Children really like looking for things. For this activity, I cut out a bat shape out of cardstock as a tracer and the Kindergartener’s traced it on black construction paper and cut them out. After, I wrote 1-100 on the bats. 

On a different day, I hid the bats around the classroom (I actually hid them on a few different days, but they found a few at a time, but it could be done all at once). Then the students found the bats. 

Now that all the bats are found, the students all have different numbers. You can start building the hundred board. Have the children work together to realize what the next number is and who has it. Then place the number to make a big one hundred board!

We did this during Halloween, so that is way they are bats, but you can do whatever things you want. Maybe you are studying mammals, so the class creates 100 mammals. 

Game Board

I cut out 1 foot by 1 foot pieces of construction paper. I laid them out around the foyer as a game board. 

Previously, the students made a spinner out of the fourth fractions pieces on cardstock and a paperclip and brass fastener. 

I individually asked each student a question by using a white board for example, reading three letter words, simple addition, and reading numbers up to the one thousandths place.  

When the student got the question right, they got to spin their spinner and move around the game board.

Sandpaper Letters/

Moveable Alphabet

At first, I did this activity with sandpaper letters. I would roll a dice and the students would get to move the amount of titles to reach a certain sound. 

I later did the same thing with the moveable alphabet. I also put pink series words on the tiles. The students would first get to a tile with a pink series card, and then build it up. When they finished a word, they would lay down the pink series word card with the three movable alphabet letters that they had. 

At the end everyone had about ten words built and they would read them aloud to the rest of the class. 

I hope these creative Montessori Early Childhood Classroom Activities were helpful! If you would like to stay up to date with more Montessori Ideas, join the newsletter!