An excerpt from the January 2024 issue of the Bay Farm Beat by Kate Drapeau, Kindergarten Teacher and ELI Patuxet Assistant Teacher.
If each and every one of us took a look back at our own experiences with math, we would almost certainly find one moment in time when we struggled with a concept or, at the very least, found one more challenging than another. I am no different. Until college, when Maria Montessori and her methodology entered my world, my relationship with math was forever altered. As a teacher, I knew that I would embrace her beautiful materials and wonderful presentations of each lesson. As I approached math the Montessori way, I saw all of my preconceived notions about math melt away with each golden bead I lay on my rug.
Maria Montessori’s math materials are among her strongest. Not only are they visually beautiful, they are hands-on tools that allow students autonomy over their own learning. Maria was a trained scientist with degrees and extensive experience in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy. She developed her methods and materials in a hospital. At that time, it was known as a children’s asylum and was located in Rome, with real children living their daily lives within the confines of those walls. She noticed these children were desperate for stimulation and activity. Therefore, through her observations, she designed learning materials that fostered a child’s natural curiosity for learning.
Montessori believed that a child’s mind is very mathematical and based on order and senses. The acquisition of mathematical information for children starts with concrete concepts and then works its way to the more abstract concepts that will carry them throughout life. Montessori Math at the elementary level includes the development of concepts such as place value, fractions, and the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These can be worked on individually or simultaneously. Montessori believed in following a child’s natural curiosity and exposing them to a prepared environment that allows for the exploration of concepts through materials, which is of utmost importance in our classrooms.
Students typically begin with a quick refresh in the golden beads. The teacher gives students a presentation on place value, and then they are quickly presented with the Stamp Game. The Stamp Game is a work with color-coded tiles and skittles. The tiles and skittles are designed to represent quantities and teach children mathematical operations more abstractly than they have been used to up to this point in their learning. The students will use the Stamp Game for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and even division. A presentation from the teacher introduces each concept, and then the students can practice these concepts during the work cycle.
A Checkerboard is used for multiplication, and Racks and Tubes are for division. The Checkerboard gives the students hands-on experience with numbers up to the millions. Students can be introduced to more than a dozen fundamental concepts through the Checkerboard.
The Racks and Tube material is one that Maria Montessori designed to bridge the gap to abstraction. Using a division board helps the students experience and come to understand how numbers are manipulated and exchanged during long division. When the students can manipulate materials, they can understand and remember the concepts more thoroughly.
The use of these mathematically concrete materials for learning provides each child with an opportunity to understand each of the operations fully. They gain confidence in regrouping and exchanging, which can typically be challenging. At the elementary level, students are also introduced to fractions, fraction equivalencies, multiples, divisibility, and all four operations in fractions with like and unlike denominators. There is also a big emphasis on learning the basic math facts. They are the foundation of so many of their works. The students are also given lessons on money and the standard and metric measurement system and are given word or story problems throughout their three years in lower elementary.
Montessori learning is a layered concept approach. Each math concept builds upon the next and gives the students the confidence to progress to the next level once they have mastered a particular operation. As Maria Montessori so wonderfully put it, “Great creations come from the mathematical mind, so we must always consider all that is mathematical as a means of mental development.”
