The short bead stair is a montessori material that helps children concretise their understanding of quantity, as they can hold it, count it and arrange it.
As you might know, I don’t believe in turning the home into a classroom, and therefore own very few Montessori materials. After last year’s parent teacher conference, I felt I should help reinforce some mathematical concepts at home, but I’m not teaching ahead since she’s in a Montessori school.
Some blogs like to introduce the colored bead stairs with a pointer or a dowel- when I hear that I basically think CHOPSTICK. So, you may model using the chopstick to push the bead up and away from the rest, pointing at each bead and counting slowly. This consolidates one-to-one correspondence, which is much more essential for number sense than memorising the numbers 1-9.
Extension 1: make the stair into a stair
It is a good idea to lay a piece of felt so the beads don’t roll around the tray. Clearly, I didn’t think of that 😂
Extension 2: matching
I had paper bead stairs from a Montessori coffret I picked up from a Parisian supermarket (when will my country sell Montessori stuff in my supermarket?!) which we matched to the colored bead stairs and the numerals.
Because of how concrete it is, I find that a simple counting activity lends itself naturally to addition. E started adding different strips together and totalling them.
Extension 3: Geometry
Making shapes with ice-cream sticks and counting the sides by placing a colored bead stair there.
E wanted to count the insides too.
Extension 4: bringing in other numbered materials
This is something I haven’t done but plan to. Got these rainbow dot blocks secondhand…
The corresponding numeral is printed on the back.
A numbered toy like this, that shows a visible increase in quantity, would work well with the colored bead stairs.
Extension 5: color matching
Got an empty chocolate box?
Line it with origami paper in the same colors as the bead stairs. It’s a pity the box didn’t have ten compartments or I could have included my ten-bead stair too.
I wrote the numbers in Mandarin instead of English. Numbers are actually easier to learn in Chinese than English, and if you know 1-10, you can pretty much count to 100. The next logical step would be to treat the box like the teens bead hanger, and put in a ten-bead stair, so the child can practise counting in Mandarin from 11-19.
The lid of the box didn’t go to waste. I drew a triangle and used it to hold my beads. What I love is that E is responding to my work with related work of her own: she decided to help me cut squares from the nine pieces of leftover origami paper. She was at it long after I had finished making the work, even declining an offer to go to the playground. Did it matter that I didn’t need her squares?
Dr Maria Montessori says, “Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.” Therein is my answer.
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