Math Magic

If you were one of the lucky parents who attended the Parent Education night on November 1, then you saw how exciting the subject of math is in the Montessori curriculum.  The teachers showed us how the child begins with the beads and works through a variety of materials that not only help her learn math facts, but that teach her brain how math works.

                                   

Ms. Kolata enthused about how, working with the bead bars, the child will gain a sensory understanding of, for example, 9². Many of us memorized the times tables and learned that 9 x 9 = 81.  The Montessori student will have a visual and tactile experience of how when 9 is taken 9 times the bead bars can be made into an actual square. Then he can take the squares of 9 to make a cube…making a reality of 9³.  And the magic doesn’t stop there.  Mrs. Muffoletto demonstrated the decanomial board and the mathematical secrets of squares and square-rooting that a student can uncover for himself while working with this material.

Mrs. Reynolds gave us a peek at the fraction works and how a child can discover the rules for adding fractions—not by memorizing, but by laying out the equations and finding out what happens with the numerator and the denominator in an addition problem.  (Read Mrs. Reynolds blog “Learning about Fractions and Eating Them, Too” http://tmaatedisonlakes.blogspot.com/2011/11/learning-about-fractions-and-eating.html if you want to know more about fraction materials.) Mrs. Dennis took us into Upper Elementary materials, revealing the advanced checkerboard and its uses as a tool in working problems with decimal numbers.

As Mr. Poole told the parents at the end of the evening, learning math with Montessori materials gives the child an understanding of math that is deep.  This understanding forms a foundation for math at higher levels in Jr. High and beyond.  In fact, Mr. Poole said he often reminds the Jr. High students of things in algebra that they have already learned by using materials throughout lower and upper elementary.  He took the opportunity to remind the assembled parents that the Montessori math curriculum provides a foundation for reasoning that will be applied instinctually to many areas of learning.

In the Montessori curriculum, the materials are not just there as extras, they don’t just illustrate facts from a book.  The materials are the curriculum.  The materials teach your child math in a way that allows the child the joy of making mathematical discoveries.

It also turns out that while using Montessori materials the student is using multiple parts of the brain.  If you want to read more about how the Montessori way of learning is good for the brain, you might want to read the book Math Works by Michael Duffy.  Duffy illustrates how modern neuroscience has caught up with just how brilliant Dr. Maria Montessori was in her approach to the learning of math.

Submitted by: Meg Rooney- Librarian at The Montessori Academy at Edison Lakes