Math

I get asked many things about Montessori. Often times, people ask about different Montessori materials. Because of this, I want to introduce some of the basic Montessori Math materials. For some of you, this may be boring since you know it all ready. If that is the case, just move on and wait for my next blog. (Feel free to send me ideas of what to ramble about)

In a 3-6 class, the materials go from concrete to more abstract. A child who has been through a Montessori 3-6 program really understands the difference between 1, 10, 100, and 1000 because they have felt it in their hands thousands of times.

These are the golden beads. The picture at the top shows just the unit bead (a single bead), the ten bead bar (10 of the beads connected together), the hundred bead square (10 of the ten bars) and the 10 cube (10 of the hundred squares).

The 2nd picture you see is similar, except now the child is able to build those 10 bars, hundred squares, and thousand cubes because there are more of each unit available.

The first thing I would like to point out is something you may not have picked up on when you read the above. Notice the terms I used for hundred ("The hundred square") and thousand ("the thousand cube"). We use these for one obvious reason - it is their shape. When studying squares and cubes in Pre-Algebra, however, was it ever presented in such a way? You knew that 10 x 10 was called "2 squared" and you knew that 10 x 10 x 10 was called "10 cubed," but did you ever stop to think about why we use those terms?

When we put ten 10 bars together, we come up with an actual, physical square. When we pile 10 of those squares on top of each other, we make an actual, physical cube. This is why we have those terms "square" and "cube."

The materials also include the same things for 1, 2, 3, ... all the way up to 10.

It is important to understand this - it is not simply a "show off" method. When we talk about the genius behind these materials, we should be careful not to talk about the fact that your preschool or kindergartener will know what 10 square is while someone in 6th grade is struggling with it. The genius behind this material is the fact that we have what are normally very abstract concepts being presented at a higher level and the material gives us a concrete foundation for those concepts.