How to Use Spielgaben for Montessori-Inspired Homeschooling or Afterschooling

Most families would love to have some high-quality educational materials that can be used from ages 3-12 both as toys and as hands-on learning activities. I’m lucky to have experience with Spielgaben educational toys … perfect for creating Montessori-inspired activities for homeschooling or afterschooling.

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.

Spielgaben Materials Used in This Post

For this post, I used wooden geometric solids from Spielgaben set 2, wooden beads from Spielgaben 2B, and sticks from Spielgaben Set 8

How to Use Spielgaben for Montessori-Inspired Homeschooling or Afterschooling

I love the versatility of Spielgaben. There’s more than one way to use Spielgaben for Montessori-inspired homeschooling or afterschooling. There are detailed playguides for ages 3-12 if you choose to follow the activities through sequentially. You can do that and add a Montessori-inspired activity tray to allow for repetition of the activity. That would work especially well if you want a lot of guidance in how you use the Spielgaben materials.

Or, you can use Spielgaben on activity trays to extend the other activities you’re doing in your homeschooling or afterschooling. That’s my favorite way to use Spielgaben.

An Example of Montessori-Inspired Activities to Extend Learning with Spielgaben

Here’s an example of how I used the Spielgaben materials recently with my 2¾-year-old granddaughter, Zoey. I wanted to put out some of the wooden beads for the beginning of the school year, so I looked at the Spielgaben Playguide 1 for some examples with the wooden beads. (Note: the downloadable PDFs are part of the complete Spielgaben set, although you can purchase them already printed out if you choose.) You could also use the materials with printables as I’ve done in many of my previous Spielgaben posts. (See those posts below.)

A number of months ago, Zoey and I had worked with the Montessori geometric solids and Spielgaben geometric solids. I decided to extend that learning with the printable about finding identical shapes.

Rather than having Zoey find the wooden bead shapes to match the shapes in set 2, I picked out one of each color of wooden beads in the sphere, cube, and cylinder and asked her to find them in the set 2 box of 12 shapes. She was able to do that easily.

Then I put the 3 geometric figures on an inexpensive bamboo paper plate holder along with the wooden beads and 3 sticks from set 8 to use as skewers.

Zoey knew the colors already, so we didn’t talk about colors. We also didn’t go into making patterns, since my focus was on reinforcing the concepts of sphere, cube, and cylinder. With each geometric figure, Zoey got out each color of wooden bead in the same geometric solid and put the shapes on the skewers. Zoey thought this was fun and different from typical lacing activities.

I really enjoy that the playguides give simple-to-use ideas that often include creative ways to use the materials. Don’t feel that you need to do all the activities on a particular page. Just do what you feel would be best for your child on a particular day. If you want to do all the activities as shown in the playguides, that’s great, too.

After Zoey was finished with the activity, I added it to our toy/math/sensorial shelf. I typically like to have one Spielgaben activity on our shelves, and I rotate the Spielgaben activities fairly often. If you’re wondering about the other activities on my shelves, you can see them in my posts about afterschooling and our raccoon/Kissing Hand unit.

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.

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