Quick and Easy Spielgaben Activity Bags {Montessori Monday}

It’s often difficult to know how to keep kids entertained in a productive way while traveling or waiting. But you don’t need to resort to technology. Activity bags can be quick and easy to prepare and give kids hands-on learning activities. They’re also great for developing concentration. I used our Spielgaben materials to put together a few quick activity bags for my 2½-year-old granddaughter to use this summer. They’re easily adaptable for a variety of ages.

 

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Spielgaben. All opinions are honest and my own. This post also contains affiliate links (at no cost to you).

In case you’re not familiar with Spielgaben toys, they are exceptionally high-quality educational toys designed for ages 3-12. You can see from the photo that the cabinet is very high quality and fits in well in a room with traditional Montessori materials. I love the new, easily removable drawers in version 4.

The Spielgaben complete set comes with over 700 pages of full-color printed learning materials. These printed materials help you as a parent or teacher easily use Spielgaben toys educationally with your child and/or students.

Note: The yarn balls in set 1 are fine for babies and toddlers. The other sets should only be used with ages 3 and older unless your toddler no longer mouths objects or you are constantly supervising your toddler during an activity using the materials.

A Set of Quick and Easy Spielgaben Activity Bags

If you have the complete set of Spielgaben toys, you’ll be able to easily prepare activity bags for traveling, waiting rooms, or times when you want to bring a learning activity outdoors. These activity bags are lightweight, take up little space, and are easy to take with you wherever you’re going.

Materials Needed for Activity Bags

Materials Used in These Activity Bags:

• Spielgaben toys
• Pencil Pouches (These are awesome because they’re attractive, durable, lightweight, and uniform in size. The rings make it easy to add a binder ring to hold them together. They’re stackable, so they take up little room in a tote bag.)
• 1½” binder ring for fastening pencil pouches together (I often use these for making homemade books as well.)
• Printables if desired
• Cardstock for printing (I don’t laminate these because they’re easier to fold when they’re not laminated. You can just fold an 8½x11″ page in half, and it’ll fit in the pencil pouch. You can laminate the printables if you wish, but I personally don’t bother with lamination for activity bags.)

Activity Bag with Wooden Beads

This activity bag couldn’t be much easier to put together. I used the wooden lacing beads and two of the strings from Spielgaben set #2. I chose one of each color of the sphere, cube, and cylinder to allow the child to explore the variety of colors and shapes.

Activity Bags with Wooden Shapes

This is an open-ended design activity bag using the wooden shapes from Spielgaben set #7.

This also uses the wooden shapes along with a free pattern block number printable from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Spielgaben Activity Bag with Sticks and Spider Web Printable

For this activity bag, I used the sticks from Spielgaben set #8 and one of the printable worksheets from Worksheet #8, Level 1.

Spielgaben Olympic Ring Activity Bags for Preschoolers and Older Kids

To give the child a model of the Olympic rings, I printed out a free Olympic rings image from Pixabay. For preschoolers, I would typically just place 5 of the rings in the activity bag for the child to place on top of the matching rings in the printable. I used the purple ring since there isn’t a black ring in this set.

Older children could use the semi circles to make interlocking Olympic rings.

Spielgaben Activity Bag with Wooden Circles and Half Circles Plus Flower Printable

I printed out a worksheet from Worksheet 9, #2 (minus the part that requires writing). Zoey thought this was a fun activity to do outside at a picnic table!

Spielgaben Activity Bag with Wooden Dots and Free Do-a-Dot Car Printable

This activity bag uses wooden dots from Spielgaben set #10. I printed out my free do-a-dot car printable at 50% so the dots would fit perfectly. You’ll find a number of different do-a-dot printables (free Montessori-inspired instant downloads) to choose from. They’ll all work when printed out at 50%. You could add a tool to help develop fine-motor coordination while transferring the dots to the letter. I used quick sticks (training chopsticks), which both Zoey and I love.

If you have a Micro Machine or other very small vehicle, you could add that to the activity bag as well. Then the child could drive the car on the letter.

These activity bags all took an amazingly short amount of time to prepare. Just choose the materials and activities that are perfect for your child’s interests and ability level. You can find many more free printables and activity ideas in my previous Spielgaben posts.

UPDATE:

All My Spielgaben Posts

Many of these include links to free printables! (Click on an image to go to the related blog post. The gallery is ordered according to publication date with my latest post at the top.)

Version 4 of Spielgaben Educational Toys 

I highly recommend Spielgaben as an amazing educational material for home or school. Even though the toys aren’t inexpensive, they’re definitely worth the price because of the high quality of materials and number of years your children or students can use them.

Special deal for my readers!