Montessori Sunday: Golden Beads (Part 1)

The Golden beads...I'm not sure if there is a more versatile material in the classroom. This lovely material introduces the child to the decimal system (including numbers up to the thousands), the idea of carrying over from one category to another (such as 10 tens turn in to a hundred), and also gives the child a concrete way to preform the four basic math operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).

Wow, that's a lot to get from one material, so to make this a more complete post I'm splitting it into two parts. Needless to say learning this material is a long process; children may end up using the golden beads for both their second and third year of children's house. A classroom that I student taught in did a great job as building a solid foundation with the golden beads and it was very apparent that the children had a good understanding when they progressed to later materials.

The initial presentation to the child is simply naming each of the different categories (units, tens, hundreds and thousands). Ideally the beads for this material are made out of glass, so when the child is introduced to the thousand cube there is a very distinct impression of how heavy and large a number this is. It is also convey to the children that there are 10 units in one of the ten bars, and 10 ten bars in a hundred square, and then 10 hundred squares in a thousand cube. This idea will be reinforced later with a special activity with the beads.

 From there the children begin fetching certain quantities of the numbers. For example: "Bring me 5 10's.No that's not a typo, I said "5 10's." The child may not have mastered the formal names of numbers yet (such as twenty, fifteen, etc.) but they can count to 10, so why should we hold them back? Yet another reason why the English language makes education so much harder!

As the child get competent they are asked to get more and more numbers until finally they are fetching from all four categories (ex. Get me 3 thousands, 4 hundreds, 5 tens, and 6 units). How's your memory feeling? I know that I sometimes forget what number I've sent them for!

Around this same time the child is introduced to the decimal cards, which are introduced the exact same way as the beads. The children also learned to recognize the cards by fetching them, and eventually work up to getting four cards at once.

Finally the beads and cards are combined and the child's memory exercised as they are asked to get numbers such as 6,592 with both the cards and beads. This can take children weeks to months to master, but it's a vital step to make sure they understand and can remember these large numbers because the next step is doing math problems with them. 

Yep, we teach children how to add, subtract, multiply and divide using numbers in the thousands. None of this silly single or double digit stuff for Montessori children....ok, ok so it sounds like bragging, but is it really all that tricky when all you need to do is be able to count to 10 and remember the names of the categories?