The Montessori Short Bead Stairs: Learning About Quantity

Vito is 38 months old.
This is a Montessori math activity on teaching the child about quantities from 1 through 9. We’ve worked on this since last year (starting from 1 to 5) and has been doing a lot of extensions.  This is a simple presentation of the work and I’m sharing some of the extensions we’re working on as well.


MATERIALS:

• a working tray
• mat or small felt
• Montessori colored short bead stairs

Take the beads out of the container and randomly place them on the mat.  I started counting by first taking the red (1) bead and counted “this is one”.  I placed it back on the mat, and took the green (2).  I said “this is two” as I count the beads and placed it back on the mat but this time under the red bead.  I went on to work with the rest of the beads, until I formed the pyramid. I followed this up with a 3 lesson period (“this is”, “where is, point me, give me” and “what is this”).


Now, 1 to 9 is a big work for a 3 years old.  I suggest that you  start with numbers 1 to 5.


Seen in the image, Vito recreates my work after the “3 lesson period”.

ASSOCIATING THE QUANTITY TO NUMBER SYMBOLS

Now, the second part of the work is associating the quantity to the number symbol. This time, we’re doing it in a linear form.  From the pyramid or stairs, I took the red bead from the top, placed it on the left side (work from left to right) and said “this is one”.  I then took the numerical 1 (Montessori small wooden number cards) and placed it beside the red bead.  I pointed to the number symbol and said “this says 1”.


Again, I continued working on it till we reached 5. There are times we skipped the 3 period lesson, because Vito would mostly want to do the work right away.

EXTENSION ACTIVITIES

Recreating Bead Designs

Vito matches the sequence of beads on the cards using the Short Bead Stair.




Matching Short Bead Stair to a fixed number of rows with numerical symbols.


Color the Short Bead Stair printable and match each one to the numerical symbol.  I prepared coloring activity sheets for us to use when Vito is ready.


We will stick with short bead stairs for the meantime, and maybe mix a little bit of math games. We will practise more and explore other forms of number symbols as well.

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