Recently, I’ve been talking more and more about Montessori at home and how I’m striving to create a calming play space for Aliyana that reflects her Montessori classroom. I noticed a huge shift in development when I enrolled her once a week into the Montessori program when she was only 11 months old. Growing up, I never experienced Montessori nor have I heard about it before, that is until I started one of my first career jobs and my boss at that time had the most calm little 2.5 year old. When I asked him what was his secret, he simply replied “Montessori”.

Aliyana’s first class came around and I think I was more excited about it than she was. We arrived into the most beautiful yet minimal classroom space, everything in the room was tailored to little humans – chairs and tables were at the perfect infant/toddler height, shelves were easily accessible, it was exceptionally tidy (even when class is over) and every toy that was available for play had a home either in a beautiful wooden tray or a woven basket. I immediately fell in love with the method. When I was pregnant, I was always wondering how to integrate children toys into the home so that it’s both stimulating and beautiful at the same time.  Montessori encourages use of natural wooden toys which Aliyana already had collected a few. Mike and I would only buy wooden toys most of the time (unless they were gifted) because we loved the way it felt and wore as she plays with them.

The Montessori method of less is more has been amazing for us. It’s slowly teaching Aliyana to stay focus and concentrate on a task vs. being scattered trying to touch and play with toys in a never ending basket or bin. I honestly never even thought about how over stimulating that could be until one day, I got down to her level and looked in the basket myself.  Let’s just say that basket is now hidden somewhere far away from Aliyana’s reach.

Over the next little while, I’m going to start sharing a little bit more about our Montessori journey, a room and play space re-design and other fun and interesting articles about this method of teaching that I’m clearly obsessed about.

Thanks for following along.