Sometimes work really is just a lot of work

"276, 277, 278, 279....."
"What comes after 79?"
"70, 10?"
"Sort of. Do you remember what we call it when we have 7 tens and add 1 more 10?"
"80!"

This was my afternoon conversation with one of the older students in the class. He was counting one of the long bead chains which are the cubes of a number in physical form. Still with me? Yeah, I wasn't there the first time either, and we actually don't tell the children this fact until the elementary years. I'll put some more pictures at the bottom of the post if you're interested in just how they work.

But on with the story.

In the ideal world the boy counting the chain would have immediately started counting "281, 282, 283..." etc. etc. Instead this happened-

"280, 290, 300..." Hmm...doesn't sound quite right does it? Obviously he has the concept of the numbers 1 to 10, and knows that these numbers repeat, but he hasn't fully understood it yet. The head teacher and I were discussing the matter and think that one of the preparatory materials for this work was actually making it harder for him to count linearly. Oops.

Especially in the math area of the classroom, early activities lay the basis for later ones. In this case the child had done a lot of work with the thousand chain. This chain has a thousand beads on it, bound together in sections of 10. The children are supposed to count the beads, and place the correctly numbered arrow at the end of each section of 10. This student had quickly realized that all the arrows he needed to place ended in 0 and that he just needed to put the first number in order. A pretty good shortcut, and one we wanted him to figure out eventually but it's making it really hard for him to do the 9 chain as the sections now each have 9 beads in them instead of 10 and the pattern of arrows is much harder to recognize. This means that he now needs to actually count each individual bead, an exercise he skipped earlier when learning how to do the thousand chain.

Now an activity that was super simple for him, has suddenly become a lot more work. And not work in the Montessori sense of the word. In a Montessori environment the activities of the child are generally refereed to as work. This is because the job of the child is to build up themselves into the adult they will become. The term work is used as a sign of respect for what the child is doing and is not meant to seem as though we are submitting them to drudgery as a adult might think when we say the child is doing work. To the child work is purposeful and fulfilling; they enjoy it.

Unfortunately, nothing ever works flawlessly, and even with all the preparation materials in a Montessori classroom you run into stumbling blocks like this one. So I spent about half an hour gently coaching him on how to count linearly. Together we made it up to 250 and will tackle the chain again tomorrow. Hopefully the work will make the shift from drudgery to purposeful.

Some more explanation of the bead chains for anyone interested-

The chains come in two different types, short and long, and there is one of each type for the numbers 1 to 10.  Below is an example of the short 5 chain-

The short chain shows the number squared. So since this is the 5 chain there are 25 beads total, separated into sets of 5. The square in the upper right is bound together and helps to subtly introduce the idea that this chain is the square of a number. The long chains on the other hand show the cube of a number (125 in the case of the 5 chain) and instead of a square the end of the chain is symbolized by a cube, such as in the photo below.

So yeah, there's a lot going on in these chains. However, when the children take them out in the environment they are simply counting the beads and placing the arrow with the correct number next to it. The idea of squares and cubes are supposed to be passively absorbed and pulled out again later when the child is introduced to this concepts in their elementary years.