Montessori is a method of education that is based on self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play. In Montessori classrooms children make creative choices in their learning, while the classroom and the highly trained teacher offer age-appropriate activities to guide the process.
While public school classrooms are generally furnished with desks and chairs in rows, a Montessori classroom is an open space that encourages roaming. While public school students fill out worksheets, Montessori students sit at scattered play stations or lay their work-mats on the floor.
The Five Principles
In a Montessori school classroom, movement is built into the work and into the lessons so that children do not spend long periods of time sitting still. For example, the work of “Golden Beads” requires that students make multiple trips to the “bank” to fetch the golden beads that they need to do their math problem.
Didactic materials – Didactic meaning “designed or intended to teach,” these are the specially-designed instructional materials—many invented by Maria Montessori—that are a hallmark of all Montessori classrooms.
Firstly, the Pink Tower helps a child build a concept of size in three dimensions. This includes working on visual perception, and awareness of dimension, both leading to an understanding of size in the environment. The Pink Tower also helps develop a child's fine muscular coordination.
The Montessori School Brown Stair, or the Broad Stair, is meant to develop the child's awareness of size difference. All ten blocks are the same length, but they vary in both length and depth. This material trains both the eye and the hand to discriminate and compare between wide and narrow.
Bend down and sit on your knees. Place the mat down with one point of contact. This point should be the bottom part of the mat on the opposite side of your body. Slowly rotate your hands away from your body so that the mat gets closer and closer to lying on the ground.
A set of Number Rods consists of ten colored rods, divided into equally-sized red and blue sections. The length of the rods progresses linearly, with the second rod being twice the length of the first, the third rod three times the length of the first, etc.
Purpose. The Red Rods are introduced to children from 2.5 to 6 years of age. This is often after they have worked on preliminary sensorial materials, such as the Knobbed Cylinders, Pink Tower, and Brown Stairs. The direct purpose of the Red Rods is to develop the child's visual and muscular perception of length.
Montessori cards and counters is math material presented in the primary years, typically toward the middle of the second year. It consists of a set of wooden numbered cards and small red wooden circular counters. These generally come in a wooden box with separate compartments for each item.
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Of learning math in montessori they actually started much younger than three even in the tabletMoreOf learning math in montessori they actually started much younger than three even in the tablet classroom your child starts learning one-to-one correspondence with one-to-one correspondence.
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To the young child, the binomial cube is an entertaining three-dimensional puzzle, but more fundamentally, it is a concrete representation of the cube of a simple binomial equation: (a+b)3. The eight wooden blocks represent the expansion of this equation.
The Montessori math materials provide years of hands-on learning for the Montessori child. After three years in the classroom, most children will have a solid foundation of quantity, place value, and the mathematical operations. They are ready to move on to elementary and the wider world of math!