I love grammar. I have loved it since I was little. My mother was an English teacher and she was always pointing out grammar in conversation or writing. Maybe that made an impression, I don’t know.

Grammar is so organized. I loved the way every word had a place when you diagrammed a sentence. When I lived in Germany, I loved learning not just the language but how it was organized, so differently than English (later, my inspiration for The Grammar Game). When I discovered Montessori, that was it for me. Organized and lots of grammar work! Those little symbols for each part of speech! So great! Plus, I loved the children, of course. I knew I’d found my place.

When we started Mandala, grammar was at the top of the list for me. As a new teacher, I did lots of grammar using all the traditional Montessori materials. But I found those materials didn’t reflect how interesting or thought-provoking grammar could be. Plus, Judy and I both wanted to tie grammar into reading and writing, making it practical and useful to both students and teachers.

The first grammar work we created and used was Literature for Grammar—passages from children’s literature that the students could analyze. Finding passages that would work with elementary students at varying age levels was tough. The lower level needed passages both easy to read and with only noun through preposition. That meant no pronouns! No I or you or her, etc. Was that even possible? Looking for the next two levels—those passages included all the parts of speech, but I never realized how much artistic license authors used.

Well, the students loved reading the passages and then the whole books. They definitely found the excerpts from books more interesting than made-up sentences. Now we just needed a template that was the right size for our papers. The first template we tried was made out of heavy duty white cardboard. Not too expensive and the right weight. But we learned when you used cardboard, you couldn’t see through it to know where to trace your symbol. So we searched for a type of plastic to use, not too thick or stiff, but transparent and durable. We found it, tested it for templates and that’s what we’ve used from then until today.

As you can see from this website, we have so many more grammar materials than just the Literature for Grammar. More to come on our continuing grammar discoveries.

Imagine you’ve just made a few new materials for your classroom and used them for a year or two with great success. “I should sell these,” you say. “I’m sure teachers would love to use them in their classrooms.” Sound familiar? It seems like it would be so simple. Then reality sets in. “How will I let people know that I’m selling this? What should I charge? Do I have to create a business with a name and everything? What would that cost? Do I have to pay taxes?”

Faced with finding answers to these daunting questions, almost every teacher realizes that selling your own great materials takes a lot more than just having the great materials. It’s a bit less daunting now with the internet but--what if no computers existed at the time you were thinking about it? And, let’s also add, what if one of you had a toddler and the other had a baby on the way? It sounds impossible, even to me.

But my teaching partner and I had just left our school and, being jobless for the moment, we wanted to give it a whirl. While teaching together, we had found that we needed more than the traditional Montessori materials to give the students an exciting, creative and fun experience. They weren’t out there, so we made them. The new materials were still Montessori-based, using the same lessons and concepts. But as important as that was, we also wanted to free the teachers up from having to write daily math problems or sentences for grammar or creating supplemental materials for their own classrooms. We wanted to give the teachers more time to teach. So I suppose we were on a bit of a mission.

That’s why, 31 years ago, being young, naive and energetic, Judy and I found the answers to all these questions and discovered more of them on our way to creating Mandala.

Two things happen when you start a business selling your own products and people actually buy them. You begin to realize: First--you can’t just sit back and fill orders if you want to stay in business. You need to create new products at regular intervals. Second-- to do that you need to be constantly open to and searching for new ideas to use to create those products. This second part is crucial if you want to keep your business thriving. Neither of us had looked that far ahead when we originally formed Mandala. However, 31 years later, we both found that we loved to be on the lookout for new ideas. There is a real joy in finding a way to turn an idea into a material that teachers not only use in their classrooms but love to use.