Follow the child

One of Montessori's foundational ideas is following the child. This means that as a guide, we introduce children to activities that interest them, and are within reach of their current abilities. This means that no matter how interested they are in the beautiful bead chains, we won't present them until the child is able to count confidently. Instead a good guide will redirect the child to an activity more suited to their current ability.

That's exactly what I did with Q today. She had taken out the spindle boxes and was happily dropping spindles in to random boxes when I found her. I gently told her she hadn't had that presentation yet, but if she wanted to count we could work on the number rods together. The number rods are the child's first formal introduction to numbers in the classroom, usually we introduce them at around 4 years of age. Since Q is just barely 3.5 I figured I'd introduce her to the first 3 or so rods and that would be about as much counting as she could handle.

I was completely wrong.

After she had set up all the rods I sat at the mat with her and was pretty surprised when she readily identified the rods of 1 to 3 with no problem. 4 and 5 needed some counting, but I was blown away by her steady focus and concentration on the task at hand. So I made it a little harder. I sat on a stool a ways across the room and asked her to fetch a specific rod for me. Fetching this way is harder because not only does the child need to remember what they are looking for longer, but there are plenty of opportunities for distraction while they walk from one point of the room to another.

Q did much better than I had even hoped. I kept it pretty easy for her, but she brought me the correct rod most of the time...though once I did catch her asking an older child to help her find the correct rod! She really liked the one on one time though, and was so confident in her counting. I'm so glad that I followed her obvious interest in numbers, because from set up to complete clean up she was engaged in this counting activity for close to an hour.

Now that is impressive a 3 1/2 year old!

Back in action

Whew, back after an almost two week break for the holidays. It was nice to have some free time, but I did miss the children. Boy were they happy to be back! Actually now that I think about it, it's kind of surprising that we didn't have anyone who was reluctant at the door.... though that might be connected to the fact that the short week had a lot of families just taking some extra vacation time.

Those who did come back though were ready to work. After doing some greeting at the door and giving a little assistance in the coat room I came into a classroom that was just humming with activity. Yet I had almost half an hour to sit and observe what was going on. Then I made the mistake of leaving the stool. I'm beginning to think that a teacher sitting quietly on a stool is absolutely invisible to the children. It's actually kind of funny.

J, one of our smallest students was wandering around, telling me she didn't know what she could do so I suggested she get out the color tablets. J couldn't find them and I didn't remember if she'd had a presentation or not. I showed her the box and asked if she wanted to invite S to work with her. I knew S had been shown the color tablets but she is also pretty shy and doesn't like to try out new work. I was really hoping that J might convince her to not only repeat this work, but to branch out to something new. Yeah...it didn't really work out that way, but oh well. So instead I decided to give J a quick refresher on how to use the tablets.

I showed her how to handle them, taking out a few colors and matching them. It was pretty easy for her, and she even knew all the names. Pretty soon she had the entire box out and mixed up for matching. Another three year old, Q, had wandered over at this point and was really interested in what we were doing. I asked J to pick out a tablet and ask Q if she could find the match. They were just delighted! Q and J thought this was just a great game. I stuck around just long enough to make sure they got the idea of taking turns and actually verbalizing the color.

And then I left. That's the ideal role for a Montessori guide; giving the child just enough to get started, working and curious for more, then leaving them to explore.

Ideally.

Because that's sure not how my next presentation went.

First off, I will give M some leeway because being invited to help make birthday treat is enough to make anyone forget what they were working on. Anyways, after that M had come back in and chose a new work like he'd been taught. I caught him, and asked him to clean up the practical life activity he had out and go back to the number rods. After he did that though I found he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing with the number rods. So I sat with him, and kept him on track....and kept him one track...and helped him some more...and realized he had no recollection at all about how to do combinations of 10 with the rods. Finally after about half an hour we had made all the combinations, written them down, and I had him start cleaning up while I read a story to some 'wanderers'.

I have to say, with as much trouble as the actual process was, M has the concept of clean up down pat! That's got to balance out not remembering how to do all the steps right? Well at least it's a transferable skill!

Montessori Sunday: Number Rods

Introducing, the number rods. These pretty red and blue rods are the child's first formal introduction to numbers and counting. By the time most children get to this work they may already know how count by rote, maybe learned from songs, stories or just parental repetition. The number rods help them to associate the name of the number with an actual quantity.

The idea of quantity is reinforced by the fact that the sections of the rod are bound together. Rather than introducing the child to counting with say, shells, whose number name with fluctuate based on how many they grab, the number rod of 9 is always going to be 9 (barring the introduction of a power saw into the environment, but I think we can say that most likely will not happen). 

The child brings the rods to the mat and the Directress has him or her build them in order of length. This process should be relatively easy because the child has already had experience with building the red rods, which are identical (except for color). After arranging the number rods the teacher takes down the shortest rod and introduces it in the form of a three period lesson.

"This is the rod of 1." She demonstrates counting it, placing a finger on the rod while saying, "1." Next she brings down the rod of two and repeats the process, moving her finger from the red section to the blue when counting each new number. This is repeated for the rod of three and then the teacher begins to give fun little commands that have the child interact with the rods. Things like, "Tap the rod of one," "Give me the rod of 3," and so on. The child is introduced to all the rods this way, until they can identify them all through counting.

And this is just the initial presentation, there are lots of activities and extensions that help solidify the child's concept of quantity and their ability to count to ten. There are also small cards with the numbers 1 to 10 on them for the child to match to the rods when they can identify the written symbol for the numbers. 

One of the things that I think is coolest about the number rods though is that there is an actual activity with them is the introduction of the idea of addition and subtraction. Yes, that's right. In preschool we are not just teaching how to count, but introducing children to the operations of math. I know there's a lot of other toys/games/activities for young children that are supposed to teach counting and math, but most don't even attempt to claim to teach the operations, thinking young children aren't capable of it. However, thus far I've shown this to at least four different children and all of them have been fascinated by the idea of adding two numbers together and easily picked up on the idea of how to do it. Score one for well designed learning equipment!