Teaching 1, 10, 100, 1000 with beads

Of all the materials I've tried from the land of Montessori, this particular bead material is my favorite.  I got it for $15 from Alison's Montessori.  It contains nine unit beads, nine ten bars, nine hundred squares, and one thousand cube.  They are connect nylon beads, not near the same quality as the individual bead sets, but they are sufficient for me.  They are far superior to the base ten sets at Amazon due to the weight of the material.  A typical thousand block in conventional base ten material is hollow and doesn't FEEL like 1000.

My favorite Montessori album is the one at http://www.montessoriworld.org/.  I love the simplicity of the outline.  Montessori has such interesting ideas that it's a tempting to proliferate material in her style and clutter up the curriculum.  Montessori World does not make this mistake.

Decimal quantities is taught directly after the numerals and quantities of 1-9 are mastered.

Exercise 1:  Introduce the quantities 1, 10, 100, 1000.  Encourage the child to feel the quantities and say their names, hand them to you or move them around the mat when the names are said, and finally identify them when presented alone.  What is this?  Hundred.

Exercise 2:  Once the quantities are mastered (without numerals), demonstrate going to the next hierarchy every time one passes nine. Ten units is actually one ten bar.  Ten ten bars are one hundred, and following until we get to the thousand block.  The is repeated on subsequent days until the child has mastered it.

Exercise 3:  Naming Quantities:  I call this "fetching."  Hand me two hundreds.  Good, put them back.  Now go find eight tens.  

Numerals are not introduced until these three lessons are mastered.

Place Value: Base Ten Blocks

This is the FIRST time my daughter understood what ones, tens, hundreds meant!

To play this game, you need two boards (laminated paper) labelled as you see in the picture, preferably NOT the same color as your blocks.  You also need base ten blocks and three dice.

It's usually played as "Race to 100", but I found that we didn't get enough practice making change for that to help.  We race to three hundred, hence the third die.  With one die, we'd be there all day.

The first player rolls the dice, calculates how many one blocks to pick up, and then makes any necessary exchanges if he has too many blocks in a column.  Play continues until someone reaches 200.  We played this every day for a week.   She still couldn't "carry" on paper, but at least she got the place value idea.  And kicked my tail at this game, lots.

Variation:  When we started learning borrowing, we played this game BACKWARDS.  Start with three hundred and race to zero.

Literacy: Phonogram Rocks

Materials Needed:  Dollar Tree river rocks, Dollar Tree knick-knack trays and/or empty Dollar Tree Zen Gardens, two paint pens(red for consonants, blue for vowels), matte clear coat spray

How to Make

1. Sort rocks according to size and how many you can fit in your storage system.  You want at least three rocks for vowels and two for each consonant.  I only do one rock for multi-letter phonograms.

2.  Draw on rocks and allow to dry completely.

3.  Spray with hubby's acrylic coat spray stuff.

I use these for teaching introducing new phonograms.  I don't use them for mass word building.  There just aren't enough rocks.  I use a printed alphabet for that.

In addition to the phonograms themselves, I also made a few rocks for symbols.  Our program has you underline long vowels and put numbers below your silent "e".  See an example below.

But the thing that I use them MOST for is our daily phonogram dictation.  Below, she is quizzing herself on the sounds, and only those she knows are invited to the "party" at the top of the mat.  The first picture in this post is another way we quiz.  I say, "Put all the "er" sounds in the box."  Or I say, "Put ch, k, sh away."

I could just have her write or do phonograms orally, but I find that the rocks provide a fuller sensory experience and make everything stick better.

Literacy: Movable Alphabet for Word Building

In Montessori language learning, there is a stage between sound learning and reading.  It's a word analysis exercise that allows the child to build the word without having to read the word.  They can hear the sounds and pull those phonograms from the box, but aren't required to deduce the word from a visual list of sounds.  

This is MAGIC for my daughter.  She is NOT interested in reading.  She is only interested in writing her own story.  I give her objects and she builds the words and arranges them as she sees fit.  

The words shown in this post are too easy for her, but she deigned to build them so I could take a picture.  

Later in the week, after the initial phonogram lesson with the rocks, we use objects or pictures and practice building those words that use the phonograms or spelling rules we're learning.  

If you want to make your own set, and you use Spalding like me, I recommend printing out this set rather than making your own like I did.  I first printed out this set because I'm a sucker for their colors and font, but Montessori doesn't do the phonograms the same way that we do in our program, so every week I have to cut and paste and build rather janky looking sheets (which you can find in my individual phonograpm lesson posts.)  Whatever you do, print out at least 6 of every letter/phonogram and ten of the vowels and common letters.  (I never have enough L's.)

Carrying: Montessori Cards and Base Ten Blocks

Middle Kid, doesn't get carrying in addition AT ALL. We've been over it and over it and it's just not going in. She's already up to adding three digit numbers in Abeka, so I decided to try it with some manipulatives. So, I got a box of base 10 blocks and printed out some Montessori Large Numerals.

In the above and below pictures, you can see that the cards are made so that the child can build the number with its component parts and then stack them to read it as they would see on a page. I HEART this idea.

So, we built the numbers, and now we combine the piles.

Then we made the "exchanges" so that there weren't over ten in any column.

She "read" the new number on the mat and wrote it down.

Now, I will tell you, that this didn't solve our problems, but it did help. "Why can't I have 14 ten bars? I don't want to exchange. How many is the limit?" I think this will be one of those concepts that we're going to make head way little bit, by little bit.

One caveat, if I had a million dollars, I'd have bought these instead.

It's harder to tell on the plastic blocks that a ten bar is ten ones. It just looks like it's own thing. It's easy to go, "I have one block, one stick, and three cubes(113). That's more objects than just three blocks (300)." Montessori bead material has WEIGHT. You can tell that the thousand block is a thousand beads because you can FEEL it.

Our School: First Grade Curriculum

I don't have a first grader this year, though I've already taught it twice and have one next year, so I think I can tell you how it goes for us.

The Original:

Religion:
St. Joseph’s First Communion Catechism
Any Lives of the Saints Book

Math:
(Option 1): Recommended in Syllabus
Arithmetic 1 (www.abeka.com)
Arithmetic 1: Tests & Speed Drills (www.abeka.com)
(Option 2):
Saxon Math 1 Homeschool Kit (www.saxonhomeschool.com)

Reading/Phonics:
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Siegfried Engelmann)

Handwriting:
Writing Can Help Series, Book B: Manuscript Practice (Marie Picard)
blank composition book

Poetry:
The Harp and Laurel Wreath (ed. Laura M. Berquist)
A Child’s Garden of Verses (R.L. Stevenson)

Art:
Child-Size Masterpieces: Mommy, it’s a Renoir! - Text (Aline D. Wolf)
Child-Size Masterpieces: Mommy, it’s a Renoir! - Intermediate Steps
Aesop's Fables
Our Lady of Guadalupe Marian Grotto Kit
Advent Candles Kit (www.illuminatedink.com)
O Antiphon Christmas Card Kit
Stations of the Cross Grotto Kit (www.illuminatedink.com)

Music:
36 Traditional Roman Catholic Hymns: A Book for Singing with Acc. CD Recordings
Peter and the Wolf (narrated by Janet Schulman) with CD (www.amazon.com)
Carnival of the Animals (comm. by B.C. Turner) with CD
Bach's Goldberg Variations (A.H. Celenza) with CD
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (A.H. Celenza) with CD
The Farewell Symphony (A.H. Celenza) with CD

How it Shakes Out for Us:


Religion:
We follow the syllabus with the addition of daily saint reading.

Math:
Will likely use Abeka 1.  At this level, the math is easy enough that we don't find it distracting.

Reading/Phonics:
We will likely follow the syllabus, but start out ahead in the lesson numbers.

Handwriting:
We will likely trace our poetry stanza for the week and then copy it into our notebooks to illustrate on Friday.

Poetry:
Follow the syllabus, except with the change mentioned above.

Art:
Follow the syllabus, minus some of the art projects.

Music:
We well likely continue our Music Masters rotations.  We also read the hilarious, "Lives of the Musicians" , color a page in our notebooks, and do a retelling.

































FIRST GRADE


I don't have anyone in first grade this year, bubasically how I would, if I did.


Recitation
Poems from Child's Garden of Verses by Stevenson (2-4 lines/wk)
Catechism prayers and questions

Reading
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (2+ lessons/wk)


Writing
Handwriting Without Tears  (2+ pages/week)
Whatever copy work I could get them to do daily from poem
Chalkboard or review sheets for all the letters and numbers


'Rithmetic
Math Mammoth (2 pages/day)


Religion
St. Joseph First Communion Catechism  (1 lesson/2wks)