Montessori Math

My son has been doing some impressive math work for a kindergartner.   For instance, he comes home with addition and multiplication problems all the time—and not little dinky 3x4=12 problems, four digit numbers being multiplied by a unit.   It looks impressive.  It looks way advanced.   It’s the kind of thing that can make you want to brag about what a brainiac you have.

For instance, my son came home with some addition work yesterday.   Here’s the problem my son came home with yesterday.   I’m pretty excited about al this math work but I can’t get him to tell me about it.   At all.   But I’ve substituted in the classroom so I know what’s happening.

Notice how each column is a different color?  The units are green, tens are blue, hundreds are red, etc.?   That has meaning.   Very specific meaning because my son solved this math problem in a long, slow, protracted way, but in a way that helped him understand how numbers work.  

The picture above is only half of the sheet, the solution half.   The part where he documented his work looked like this:  

For every unit in the units column my son counted green “pips” (little wooden things) into a bowl.   He would add three, then seven then nine.    Once he had that done he counted the total and filled in the number (twenty) by shading in the appropriate amount of squares on the sheet.  

Next he has to figure out if he has any full “tens” that need to be carried.   In this case there are two full rows, so he marks two hashes and puts two blue pips into the tens bowl.   Because he did an exchange (ten units for one ten) he returns the “exchanged” green pips back to the bank.   

He continues this process through to the last column, in this case the ten thousands column.   The final result is to transfer the number to the original problem, making it look to parents like me that my child is sheer kindergarten genius.   

As a substitute who’s seen children working through this type of problem, it’s exciting to see their minds moving slowly and deliberately, but understanding the entire concept of numbers and math as they do so.    

The Big Boy Update:  Math, my son loves it.   His teacher says he’s excelling in math and that he doesn’t even need to use the counting beads as often because he’s making the mental leap in his mind.   Penmanship…not so much.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  It was cold today—cold and windy.   On the way home my daughter was asking me about evergreen trees and how they didn’t mind the snow (of which we have none) and if bushes were evergreens.   We got into how plants could hibernate, just like our grass which is currently all brown but will return to green in the spring.   My daughter, who always thinks of other people said, “is the grass happy?”