Moving Math By Cheryl Allen
The Montessori math materials might be some of the most memorable materials in the curriculum. I can still feel the weight of the thousand cube from when I held it in my hand as a five- or six-year-old. I am not young, so all our classroom beads were glass. The visual difference and tactile difference between the unit, ten bar, hundred square, and thousand cube brought numbers to life. I could spend (what seemed like) hours taking my tray over to the back corner of the classroom to get four ‘tens’ or five ‘thousands’ to build a number with my friend Blake. We could build and write numbers up to 9,999. We could add and subtract, bringing more thousand cubes or returning them to the shelf. We could make exchanges, carrying ten hundred squares over to the shelf to get that thousand cube. I was supposed to take the tray for those, but I loved carrying the thousand cube in my hands. It let me know that one thousand was a lot; it was heavy, much heavier than one unit. It helped me feel the differences in place value.
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Montessori’s Golden Beads introduce place value. They show the place values through sight and weight; a unit is one golden bead, and a thousand cube is a thousand golden beads connected together into a cube. This attractive material primes the brain for much more advanced work later. Ten squared is one hundred and is a square shape, ten cubed is one thousand and makes a cube. When we added, we built one number, setting out our units, ten bars, hundred squares, and thousand cubes across the work rug as you would write it. We set out number cards next to the number, so we saw the written form of the number and saw it represented with the golden beads. Then we did it again for the next addend. When it was time to add, we joined all our units together and counted them. If we had more than nine, we needed to make an exchange by taking ten units back to the shelf
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