I love making homeschool materials for Jax with bright, colorful photos. I normally make Montessori-style 3-part cards: One card with a photo and a label, one card with just a photo and one with just the label.
Lately Jax hasn’t been quite as drawn to them, so I decided to change things up. I’m starting a mini fruits and vegetables unit, so I put together these beautiful photo and word puzzles.
Fruit & Veggie Word Puzzles
To create the puzzles, I printed them on normal paper. You could use card stock for added strength. I cut out each puzzle, but left the pieces together before running them through the laminator. (I have this one
Here’s a quick tip for when you have a lot of little pieces to laminate: a little dot of glue stick on the back of each item will keep everything straight as you run them through the machine. This has saved me a lot of reprints! It’s just the worst when things slide around and overlap.
Once laminated, I cut each puzzle into individual pieces. I normally cut things prior to laminating in order to have a clear edge around all sides. But I wanted the puzzles to fit together without gaps.
I am presenting three puzzles at a time, starting with them separated. Later on I can change them out or even mix a couple puzzles together for him to sort.
I’ve included some control versions of each puzzle without the cut lines and extra letter spacing.
Do you want to make your own? You can get the fruit and veggie word puzzle printable here.
Farmer’s Market Matching
This farmer’s market matching activity is a quiet book page I made for Jax about a year ago. I love pulling quiet book pages out of the school closet when they match our current theme.
This page features a big basket of veggies (and fruit, if you want to get technical!) that need to be sorted into their proper bins and barrels in the farmer’s market. There are hand painted tags that Jax looks at to figure out which goes where. I made sure to include word puzzles in our printable that match the veggies in this activity, so they tie together.
If you’d like the free pattern to make your own farmer’s market quiet book page, you can find everything you need here.
Fruit & Veggie Chopping
I’ve started letting Jax help chop his apples and cucumbers at lunchtime. This is a big part of Montessori for 3-year-olds. They really focus on Practical Life activities. Activities like chopping help with fine motor skills needed to grip a pencil and write. In addition to chopping real food at meal times, Jax has some fruit and veggie chopping toy sets.
We have the Melissa & Doug Deluxe Wooden Cutting Fruit Crate
Other Activities
We’ll be bringing out our fruit patterns and sorting pie. That pie is always a huge hit!
We have this really cute book that we read in preparation for a trip to an apple orchard. We’ve been making (and planning!) a lot of apple recipes, including apple pie and this apple cake.
Here is a Pinterest-ready photo for you!
It’s Montessori Monday! Be sure to check out all the other great homeschool ideas linked up throughout the week!
This is wonderful! You are so generous to share this, thank you!
Thanks so much for sharing this!
It’s absolutely brilliant and can’t wait to get to it when I get a laminator!
My son is only 2 but we are home educating and are Montessori/Waldorf inspired so these come in so handy!
Thank you again for taking the time to share what you get up to for the patterns…all for free!
X x
You’re awesome
Fabulous, as usual, Stephanie! I like your idea to create word puzzles with the photos! Thanks so much for sharing your printables. I featured your post as the Free Printable of the Day at the Living Montessori Now Facebook page and on Pinterest.
These are so pretty and colorful! Thanks for sharing!
This is a wonderful activity! Thank you so much for your generosity!
Thank you for sharing. I am inspired.
Excellent unique ideas, I love them all. Thank you so much Stephanie I’ve been looking to teach children about fruit and vegetables! Problem solved 🙂
I just printed out the template for the vegetable sorting game and I’m in the process of cutting them out. I printed them out on paper normal A4 and was just thinking of making them last longer. If I put them onto cardstock will they go through the laminator okay or will they get stuck as it maybe too thick anyone done this before.
I haven’t tried, but I think it would work in the laminator I have… I often glue my paper to construction paper and scrapbook cardstock before laminating.
Love your ideas! I’m going to tie some of this in with our gardening. One of the skills I’d like for my nephew to gain pertaining to this topic is telling whether each individual food is a fruit or vegetable. I thought about cards and just separating them into piles, since I don’t have the toy version of all the fruits/veggies, or I suppose I could use the actual fruit/veggie.
Stephanie – thank you so much! I’m wondering, you laminated and then cut the puzzles apart….did that leave a raw edge (I’m assuming). Is it holding up ok? I’m worried my three-year-olds won’t be kind to the exposed edge. Thanks for your advice!
Jax is pretty gentle with his school materials, so he probably isn’t a good test for how strong they are!
Thank you so much for sharing this is exactly what i needed for my preschool class, they will love this puzzle game!
Hello! Congratulations for your blog is fantastic!! i like so much the idea of puzzles but can you say me the name of the program or app to do?. I would like to make my own puzzles. Thank you!!