Addition

Every Friday Eva comes home with a packet of the work she has done throughout the week. This week one of the items was a page of addition problems. Her teacher wrote the problems and Eva determined and recorded the results (with some guidance from her teacher).



The math component of the Montessori method gets me excited. It's so tactile and visual and natural. Math can sometimes be such an abstract subject for students; the way it is presented in Montessori makes it so much more concrete.

Here is what A Parents' Guide to the Montessori Classroom by Aline D. Wolf has to say about it:

A child in a Montessori class never sits down to memorize addition and subtraction facts; she never simply memorizes multiplication tables. Rather, she learns these facts by actually performing the operations with concrete materials. When the child wants to do arithmetic, she is given a sheet of paper containing simple problems. She works the problems with appropriate materials and records her results. Similar operations can be performed with a variety of materials. This variety maintains the child's interest while giving her many opportunities for the necessary repetition. As she commits the addition facts and the multiplication tables to memory, she gains a real understanding of what each operation means. In a Montessori classroom there are many materials that can be used for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

THE SHORT BEAD STAIR

The Short Bead Stair represents the quantities one through ten in easily recognized colors. A single red bead represents 1. A bar of two green beads represents 2. A bar of three pink beads represents 3, and so forth, with the bar of ten golden beads representing 10. If a child wishes to do the sum 3+5, she places the bar of three pink beads beside the bar of five blue beads, counts the total number of beads and records her result: 3 + 5 = 8.