Montessori Sunday: Golden Beads Part 2

Last week I introduced the Golden Bead material, one of the key Montessori materials for teaching math. This work allows young children to work with numbers in the thousands while only needing to be able to count up to 10. Pretty neat.

When Dr. Maria Montessori first came up with the idea of the golden beads she thought they would be used at the elementary level, that the younger students in the Children's House would not be interested or able to understand the idea of them. What she found though was that it was children around 4 or 5 years old who were truly interested in using these beads to convey the idea of numbers, not the older elementary children! It's pretty amazing what children can comprehend if given the right context to experience something with.

Once the child has become comfortable with identifying all the beads and cards by their names (1, 10, 100 & 1000), they can begin learning the change game. Learning this as adult even made an impression on me. I remember needing to carry over numbers in school, but didn't really have a good understanding of why. Learning to do so with the golden beads finally made it click exactly why and what was happening. Now I wish I would have just learned it this way in the first place!

The directress will have the child bring a large tray over to the supply of golden beads on the shelf and begin loading it up in a haphazard manner. Handfuls of 10's, fistfuls of units and piles of hundreds are added to the tray without much thought as to their order. At a mat the directress informs the child that they are going to count ALL these beads, usually sparking a shocked response since the messy pile looks unconquerable. To make it a little less intimidating the beads are sorted into categories.

"Let's start with the units. 1, 2, 3..." The directress shows how to count the beads one by one into a small cup. "10! Wait, 10 units? That's the same as 1 ten bar. Let's go back and exchange these." Together child and adult go and exchange the units for one of the bars of 10. And so the counting goes until there aren't enough unit beads to make into a ten bar. The ten bars are counted and exchanged in to hundreds, then the hundreds counted and made in to thousands. Finally there's only a small piles of beads left and the child is sent to fetch the matching cards to form the written number.

"That's our answer, we counted all the beads we had on this tray. Want to do it again?"

The act of simplifying this messy mountain down is a favorite with children. It seems so intimidating until they begin to actually do the process and find out how simple it is. It's also extremely important that they fully understand this concept because they will need to be able to exchange beads freely using the four basic math operations.