Geometry: Tessellation Work

Original Equipment

A lost piece of original equipment from Dr. Montessori has now been re-created!

When we sold one of our school locations, I made the mistake of including our sets of tessellation work with the geometry equipment. I had no idea that I’d never be able to find it again!

The good news is that I got an authentic re-creation produced:

You can find these Montessori Tessellations at Olga’s shop. The painted and unpainted sets both have their merits, so it is up to you. Olga followed the original color scheme from my mother’s notes from Dr. Montessori, so they are quite authentic. She uses high-quality European paints (Europe has stricter safety standards for children’s material than the US), too. She also has digital downloads!

Incidentally, boxes of random shapes do not fulfill the same function as these specific shapes.

It took me almost a year to find Olga and her shop. Initially, I started talking to woodworking shops in the US, but I finally realized that the woodshop would need a deep understanding of plane geometry in order to make these sets from scratch. Getting the shapes to work together is harder than it seems, plus the angles for each shape must be exact.

Then I remembered how impressed I had been by the math and geometry skills of the Montessori children in Bulgaria, so I looked online for wood shops located in Bulgaria. That is how I found Olga, who is the mother of a Montessori child.

And that is the story of the tessellation work!