First, my apologies for the lousy photos in this post. There’s no light around here right now (rainy weather) and I needed a big space to spread out! This is what has kept me busy for the better part of the past…three days:

I have been printing, laminating, and cutting out Montessori 3-part cards and other manipulative materials for the coming school year.  It took me almost 9 hours to print it all.  (This is completely ridiculous, actually.  It should not have taken nearly that long, but our printer decided it hates cardstock, so I had to physically shove every individual sheet of cardstock into the printer.  And then some of them still didn’t work right, so they had to be redone.)  Then it took about 3 hours to laminate everything and a while to cut them apart.  (I don’t know how long.  Probably somewhere between 5-8 hours, but this was spread out over a couple days, so I’m not sure.)

I did learn a few tricks along the way.  For instance, even if I can’t get them lined up quite perfectly on the paper cutter, the slight lack of accuracy is still worth it for the time it cuts off (no pun intended!), as opposed to hand-cutting them with scissors.  (That’s a lot of straight cuts!)

For a closer look, here’s what I printed:

You’ll probably be seeing more of most of these later, as we arrive at the appropriate units of study to put them to heavy use.  I was planning to give you a list of their sources in this post, but it has occurred to me that I should probably use a numbered photo to do that, so I’ll add another post for that.  [UPDATE: The list is now available here: https://titus2homemaker.com/2013/07/where-to-find-the-free-montessori-materials/]

All of these printables were freely available online, by the way.  (There are lots of others you can get if you want to pay for them.  I just figured this was a good start!)

Stay tuned for the list of sources!