I finally got around to setting up Téa's shelves.
We have been presenting treasure baskets to her for a while, but now that she's increasingly aware of her surroundings I have felt like a shelf where we can properly store her materials is overdue.
This was my first attempt. I thought I'd start simple.
It evolved, rapidly, to include more materials. I think we now have a good balance of materials for discovery and for fine motor skills.
Here is what is on her shelves:
A basket of balls of all different textures, including some fruit!
Coloured bottles from this post, stored in a see-through box (from our Sophie the Giraffe teether) to play off the idea of transparency -- I read this post about packaging materials in a way that is interesting for discovery.
Nested mixing bowls, and a collection of metal spoons of various sizes and textures. Mixing bowls make a great Montessori nesting set because they are all identical except for their size (compared to commercial nesting/stacking toys that come in different colours, shapes and textures). I like to store the metal spoons here to draw some similarity between metal objects, and because the spoons are great to hit the bowl with -- the different sized mixing bowls produce different pitches.
A glockenspiel with various objects to hit it with. We were gifted this one.
Our egg + cup, still her favourite grasping material. She can sometimes put the egg in the cup with prompting.
And lastly, I reconfigured our stacking rings to make them simpler and easier to handle. We have the very affordable IKEA MULA stacking ring, but I felt like the entire set was too many. So I've placed three of the Ikea MULA stacking rings on a small cd holder -- I think three is enough for a start, and I like that they are at least similar in colour tone. I use the dowel rod from the MULA stacker for bigger rings that are easier to hook onto the rod. Téa mostly likes to pull the rings off the rod, but sometimes she's able to hook them on.
Téa is standing but not crawling yet, so she always grabs the materials on the top shelf but rarely looks at the materials on the bottom. She's not disinterested in the materials on the bottom shelf, as she'll happily play with them if I pull them out. I've thought about rotating the top and bottom shelf materials, but at the same time I want everything to have its rightful place.
How do you use your Montessori work shelves? Do you give your baby complete freedom on what to choose, or do you guide her to different materials? Do you pick up the materials and then move her to another spot so that she can concentrate on her work as opposed to wanting to pull other materials off the shelves?
