The shelf tour
About Montessori Bloggers Network
I'm Linnea Voss — mom of an 18-month-old and a four-year-old, and, before my kids arrived, a classroom assistant in a Montessori toddler community for three years. Let me say the important part plainly: I am not an AMI- or AMS-certified guide. I'm the person who set up the shelves, not the person with the diploma. When a question is genuinely pedagogical, I quote and link the people with the training — the certified guides, the AMI and AMS source material, and the books — and I tell you when something is just what worked in my house.
What I can offer is the part of Montessori that happens after the theory: which materials actually get used, which floor beds survive midnight roll-offs, what a prepared kitchen looks like when the kitchen is small and the budget is normal. My editorial rule of thumb hangs over the whole site: a shelf with four toys beats a toy box with forty.
The true history of this site
Montessori Bloggers Network is much older than my time here, and its history deserves telling straight. It was founded around 2014 as exactly what the name says: a real, collaborative hub where a group of Montessori and Montessori-inspired bloggers — parents and teachers — pooled their best writing "to bring the very best Montessori posts to one fantastic blog." Its contributors went on to become some of the most trusted voices in the Montessori world; several of the blogs they built are still the best in the niche, and you'll find them linked generously throughout the Network Reader. The site's signature project, the annual 15 Days of Montessori for the Holidays series, was a genuine community event.
Around 2017 the site went quiet, and the domain eventually lapsed. What happened next is the unglamorous fate of good expired domains: between roughly 2020 and 2021 the address was taken over by spammers and pointed at content that had nothing to do with children or Montessori, then sat parked while link-sellers scribbled on it. In 2026 we brought it home.
To be completely clear: we are not the original operators. The founding editor and the original contributors are not involved in this restoration, none of their posts have been reused, and we don't write in anyone's name but our own. What we restored is the topic, the brand, and the spirit — a curated, generous hub for Montessori at home — because the seat this site occupied has been empty since 2017. If you followed a years-old link from a holiday blog hop or a color-mixing lesson to get here, that's the whole story: same shelf, new steward, and nothing but gratitude for the people who built it first.
How the "network" works now
One editor can't be a network, and I won't pretend otherwise — there are no invented contributors here, no fake bylines, no "our team" page. Instead, the network promise is kept the honest way: the Network Reader is a recurring curated digest of the real Montessori blogosphere — themed roundups that link out, credit fully, and quote accurately. The rest of the site is my own writing: Sleep & Rooms, Toys & Shelves, Practical Life and Learning at Home — function-first, anti-clutter, and tested on two actual children.
A note on affiliate links: some posts contain affiliate links — if you buy through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Prices are always hedged, verdicts are never for sale, and I only recommend things that earned their spot on a real shelf. More in the privacy note.