Montessori-Sand-Paper-Green-Numbers

Ok, this may not be crafting of the sewing or knitting kind but it’s still crafting, right?  Well, I’m going to blog it since when I don’t sew or knit, I TRY to “home school” my 3.5 year old, which involves “making stuff”.

My daughter attends a Montessori based long day care centre, so when she became interested in learning numbers and the alphabets, I thought the Montessori sand paper letters and numbers were good teaching tools.  Now why bother making these?  Because if you know Montessori equipments, though very beautiful to look at and work with, they are terribly expensive, to buy especially the ones from Nienhuis.

So armed with my book Teaching Montessori In The Home by Elizabeth Hainstock, I set about making 10 cards for numbers and 26 cards for the alphabets.  Now which font?  Cursive or print?  Uppercase or lowercase?  There are many discussions out there regarding which is supposedly better but in the end I chose to use the Montessori Script from Mac Rhino Fonts (it looks half cursive and half print?) in lowercase (or try here if you’re after the Windows version – thanks to a lovely reader who left the link).

Prepare your cards – you’ll need 36 cards (mine are 6″ x 6″ white heavy cardstock)

Traditionally, consonants are on pink boards, so I just glued pink cardboard to 21 of my 6″ x 6″ cards.

Vowels are on blue boards.

And the numbers on green boards.

Once all the coloured cards are done (21 pink, 5 blue and 10 green), print your chosen font straight onto the back of a piece of fine grit sandpaper, making sure to print the mirror image (so that it’s not back to front when you glue it on the card) and only the outline (to save ink).  Now cut up all those alphabets and numbers while watching MasterChef (so you don’t get too bored), then depending if your child is left or right handed, glue your sandpapers either towards the left or right hand side of the cards.

This will give your child enough room to hold onto the card whilst working on the alphabet/number.

Here is my daughter tracing the letter “guh”.

I  hope she’s not too confused being exposed to different fonts.

Now I’m thinking of maybe redoing the sandpaper letters in NSW Foundation Font.  I didn’t realise that each state of Australia has their own style of writing.  Does it matter if she doesn’t write this way?