My Favorite Printable Prep Materials

As first a Montessori classroom teacher, then a Montessori homeschool teacher, and finally a Montessori-inspired printable maker, I’ve had a lot of experience with preparing printable materials over the years! These are some of my favorite materials for Montessori printable prep:

Printer

The printer I have is old and it looks like they no longer make it, but this is the newer version of it. I have to order ink refills about every 6 months, which is about $70 — but I’ve found that the non-name brand options (look for the ones that say they’re compatible with that printer) are significantly cheaper and they work just as well, so I order those instead. [My old printer did NOT work well with non-name brand ink, so read the reviews first! Since the one I linked is a newer version, they may have changed things that make it non-compatible with other brands of ink.] I have always been happy with the quality of the color printing it does, and it’s still working even though it’s so old that they have a newer version on the market now!

Laminator

When I was in the classroom, I would print things on regular printer paper and then laminate them so they could hold up to lots of little hands touching them every day. This is my laminator, which is at least 10 years old and still works great! There is much debate over whether to cut materials before laminating them (and then cut again after they’re laminated) or to put the whole paper in the laminator and cut out the cards afterward. I have always been in the “cut twice” camp — cut out each card, arrange all the cards on a laminating sheet, laminate, then cut out each laminated card again.

Paper

When I was homeschooling with only two children, the materials didn’t need the same level of protection, so I just printed them on 65lb cardstock instead and didn’t laminate at all.

Cutting

A lot of people use paper cutters to cut out all of their printables, but at home I have always just used scissors. It takes longer, but I can make more accurate cuts that way — or maybe I’m just not very good at using a paper cutter! The paper cutter we used at school is similar to this one.

When my kids got to the age when they were pretty good with scissors, they would sometimes help cut out new printable materials. It was certainly not perfect, but it gave them a sense of purpose and it cut down on the work load for me.