We were fortunate enough to get class sets of the official Montessori grammar boxes. The question was…where do we put all the cards so they are easily accessible?

Confession! I laminated the word cards. YEP! Laminated them.  I know that it is frowned upon to do so, but I have 90 students a day that need to use them and would like to get more than one year out of this very expensive resource.

 

One of my colleagues saw these great organizers at Fleet Farm, and realized they were just what we needed.  This particular one has 60 drawers, which was more than enough for the parts of speech cards.  I have been toying with the idea of creating some extra sentences, that are more complex, for my students that already have mastered the grammar boxes.  To be fair, there are very few students that have come to me having already done these despite two of our feeder elementary schools being Montessori focused.

While the grammar boxes are the only pre-packaged manipulatives that we have in our classrooms, my colleagues and I continue to create our own shelfwork that coordinates with and supports our Language Arts units.

After spending copious hours copying, laminating and cutting out the different root sorts, I realized that it was going to be interesting to get the box back to school without all the various drawers and contents ending up all over my car.

These boxes are also very helpful for the Greek/Latin root sorts that we have been doing throughout the year.  I like the 39-drawer Stack-on box for them because I can store larger task cards and sorting activities in the big drawers on the bottom.