How Montessori Students Progress Through The Levels

Summary: The materials used in teaching mathematics to Montessori students exceptional. They look quite different than what you used, and there are several reasons to use them.

Much of the Montessori curriculum is about providing exposure to children with concrete materials first and then giving them incremental opportunities to work with abstract contents. The approach is the same when it comes to teaching mathematics. The word “concrete” means something solid that children can hold in their hands. These materials are symbolic. They represent something else, perhaps a number, and that symbolism changes over time until kids are ready to let go of the materials to find solutions on paper or even in their minds. This particular idea of learning and mastering a skill without the assistance of materials is what experts describe as "abstraction."

Early childhood mathematics

While Montessori Math Materials look simple, preschoolers are capable of more than what you can imagine. Even before a kid learns to count, he/she experiences the skill using materials, such as number rods. Children use different Montessori materials to learn how to count. Apart from number rods, kids also use spindle boxes. The spindle box is an early material with which children place the appropriate amount of wooden spindles in compartments numbered from 1 to 9. Sandpaper numbers, just like their alphabet counterparts, teach kids how to form each number correctly to develop readiness for writing them on paper. When a child is ready to learn the basic operations, they can use plenty of Montessori materials.

The overlapping period

Just between kindergarten and the first year of lower elementary, teachers use new Montessori Math Materials depending upon their individual capabilities and readiness. The stamp game is probably the best example. The stamp game material is a box that contains several sections. All these sections have small colored tiles inside them. The color of those tiles helps them learn about the hierarchies of “ones, ” “tens, ” “hundreds, ” and “thousands.” Instead of holding large cubes that show the relative size of one thousand as they did with those golden beads, they now represent the series of tiles that are all of the same sizes. The only two things that differentiate them are the color and number label.

About elementary math

You already know about the colors of the stamp game. The green, blue, and red tiles of the stamp game are the hierarchical colors, and teachers use them to teach the number series to children. The hierarchy of colors first appears in the stamp game, but they don’t stop there. They continue to stay with the child throughout lower and upper elementary until they have a firm grasp on the idea of the simple family of numbers. Once a child masters the stamp game, they move on to use the material called the bead frame. It teaches addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

Much more

Simple mathematics isn’t the only thing that Montessori students learn. They also explore the basics of geometry and fractions at an early age. Primary children can learn the names of geometric shapes. They can easily identify cubes, spheres, square-based pyramids, rectangular prisms, ellipsoids, and much more. As they move into elementary, they learn more about the range of concepts, including the studies of polygons, triangles, angles, and more.