How can Montessori Mathematics play an important role towards building a child’s analytical mind equipped for education in 21st
Century
Poor thinking skills in schools today
Mathematical mind
Three important principles that are essential for mathematical understanding are:
Other important fundamental mathematical concepts include:
Mathematical
preparationPractical Life Activities
Conservation,
Reversibility• Pouring liquids / solids between different or the
same size containers
• Spooning between different size containers
One to one
correspondence• Matching/ pairing lids to jars or boxes
• Setting a table
• Planting seeds, one per pot
Volume, mass,
measurementCooking, weighing out ingredients
Pattern,
symmetryPaper cutting
Geometry,
fractions (½, ¼)Napkin folding
Laying the foundation for the future
The child perceives, without
conscious ,reasoning,
patterns of relationships:
Sensorial material
She never learns a name that doesn’t have a meaning. e.g. the number cards are only introduced after the child has worked with the number rods.
Numeration 1-10
Number Rods
Sandpaper numerals
Rods & Cards
Spindle Boxes
Cards & Counters
1 Golden Bead is a
unit (point)
10 Golden Beads
make a ‘bar of ten’
10 ‘bars of ten’ make
a ‘hundred square’
10 ‘hundred squares’
make a ‘thousand
cube’
children who could count to ten could just as easily count to 6,452 using, for example, six 1000 cubes, four 100 squares, five tens, and two ones.
The Montessori materials not
only enables a child to see
the symbol for 1 or 1000, but
also allows him to hold the
corresponding quantities in
his hand.