Since Emil approached 12 months I added some new materials on our Montessori shelve for every day to explore and play.  On his shelf he has:

Large and Small Balls – also, an early opportunity for a child to discriminate size. The child has to sort out which bead to place where by the height of the post and the size of the bead. Still little bit advanced for him. He mostly just plays with the balls.

Thick and Thin cylinder – an early opportunity for a child to discriminate size. The child has to sort out which cylinder to place where by the size of the hole and the thickness of the cylinder.

Object Permanence Box – this activity gives the child practice with hand-eye co-ordination as the ball is put through the hole at the top. The ball then rolls in and out of sight giving a lesson in object permanence. The ball is then delivered to the front of the box ready to repeat the activity over and over. Do I need to say that he mastered this activity.

Peg and Egg – simple but fun activity.

Language Basket – with objects of different animals and book with matching pictures. Here I also highlight sounds that animals make.

Bead Mover – This is a great fine motor toy as the babies move the beads. Nora loved this and it took a fair amount of concentration. She will be able to use this for a long time. 

Simple Puzzle – Ideally, we would have single shape puzzle for his age since this is still a bit complicated, but this is what we have.


We also have so many books and he has small shelf where I keep few books. Each week I rotate them for new ones. If you didn’t notice before I LOVE children’s picture books and we already have SO many so I keep them on side offering one or two at the time.

I also added few new Montessori friendly toys. I will show you in separate post. I rotate the toys gently. I keep his favourites out and those that are used less I rotate every week.

As an important note I’m showing Emil to put his toys away, back in the same place they came from when he has finished with them. It will be a while until he is able to put away his toys himself but I am sure he already knows where they go.

Does this seem like a lot of toys to you? I would love to hear your opinions.