Introducing Montessori Hundred Board for Preschoolers

I know that Montessori math should be introduced later on (language/reading should come first) but with Vito I just couldn’t resist introducing him to some traditional Montessori math materials as early as 35 months old!  You see, currently he just wanted to count.  Whenever we read books, he wanted to count the images first before allowing me to start reading.  If I ask him to make letter sounds, he would say “no, let’s count first” referring to counting the letters in a word rather than reading it.  We’ve done a lot of counting,  but he seems pretty bored lately.

So the other day, I was tidying up my storage shelf and Vito saw our Hundred Board.  He immediately took it out and excitedly said “Oh numbers! Let’s count!” and that’s what we basically did for the past few days. 

This was the first set up.  I talked about the hundred board, and pointed out to the numbers that he already knew.  Then for the activity,  I separated the number tiles from 1 to 20 for him to match to the control board.  So it’s just a matching activity and an introduction to the order of numbers.

We played this like in a BINGO game, he closes his eyes, picked a number tile, identify the number and match it to the control board.

Though it was pretty simple and he seem to enjoy it, he was a bit distracted of the other numbers in the board.  Like when he picked number 8, he would at times put the number tile to numbers that ends with 8 like 48, 68 etc. 

So the next day, I made him this (see picture below).  It’s a replica of our control board except that it only shows numbers from 1 to 20.  I used the Sassoon font as it matches the text in our Hundred Board.  With this, he can only focus on the numbers that were just presented. 

The presence of the tractor is a must.  He used it to search for the number match, it goes around the board and the tractor will stop on the number that matches with the number tile.  It was a game invented by himself

He can’t finish the entire 20 numbers, but it’s good exercise for number recognition and order, plus a little bit of “something new” in our weekly math activities.
 
The board will remain in our shelf for a week.  I will swap it with something else if ever he loses interest.  I’m not yet sure if its just passing, or its part of his “sensitive years”.  I know to some kids like Mavi, they started with letter obsession, but with Vito all is different and I wasn’t expecting this at all.  Better be vigilant and be prepared to feed their thirst for knowledge regardless of their interests!

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