Pastel beads and brightly colored squares make math concepts pop.

Eight “purple six” bars on the red “thousands square” = 8 x 6,000.
Three “green two” bars on the red “millions square” = 3 x 2,000,000.
Pastel beads for digits combine with green, blue, and red squares for place value to help students visualize problems as complex as 2,456,004 x 3,048—making long multiplication easy to master by third grade.
LePort Montessori math is powerful. Concrete learning materials presented sequentially, from Number Rods in preschool to this Multiplication Checkerboard in elementary, provide an engaging medium where students deepen their understanding and quickly progress through increasingly advanced math concepts.

Watch children progress through the colorful Montessori math sequence. Experience how challenging math is accessible when children use our sensorial, geometric learning materials to represent key concepts. This is how math becomes fun!

Math at LePort Montessori

Unfortunately, most Americans are bad at math. In fact, many fear math: math anxiety is an official psychological diagnosis! Many children are not well prepared-enough to succeed STEM course in college, and, as a result, 40% of all doctoral degrees in science and engineering are now awarded to foreign-born students. 43% of adults in the US were rated as not financially literate at even a basic level in a recent world-wide survey; even among wealthier adults, only 36% were financially literate.

At LePort Montessori, we tackle this problem from the start. Our Montessori math program makes math enticing, even irresistible to preschoolers with carefully sequenced, multi-sensory materials. Preschool children learn to count, then skip-count, with colored bead bars and chains. They discover place value as they fetch Golden Beads to build numbers, and make them out of color-coded numerals. As they move up into our Montessori elementary program, the familiar materials from their preschool years help children tackle larger numbers (into the millions by 1st grade), and new materials—with the same color coding and internal logic—guide them as they steadily move toward a full, conceptual, abstract understanding of math concepts.

While there are many good reasons to choose a LePort Montessori program for your child, Montessori Math alone may be worth the price of admission!

“I LOVE math….I also was a product of Montessori education through elementary…. I understood math concepts when others did not. Geometry was easy because I had held a sphere, cone, etc. (A cube is not really a cube on a black line or in a textbook.) Place value and fractions were easy because I experienced the hands on materials in the Primary classes and retained the information. It was mastery and not memorization. Thanks to my Montessori parents, I got to experience math the Montessori way and still love it 38 years later!”

—A parent on MariaMontessori.com

Montessori Math Highlights in Color

The Montessori math program is so rich and advanced that it’s hard to provide you with an overview that is accessible and not overwhelming. Shown below are some of the materials that carry through the Montessori math colors—colored bead bars for individual numbers, and green/blue/red for place value.

This is just a glimpse of some of the Montessori math materials. We of course cover much more—from fractions to geometry, all of which is supported with similarly carefully sequenced materials that progress from concretes to abstractions, from preschool to elementary. Curious? Contact us to arrange for a tour, and we’d be happy to show you how all this works in practice!

After learning to associate number with quantity to ten (see Number Rods and Spindle Box below), children build numbers up to 20 with the Teen Board. This material first introduces them to the colored bead bars: One is a red single bead, two are two green beads strung together, so on to nine dark blue beads and ten golden beads. This color-coding of numbers is consistent from early preschool, all the way to upper elementary!

Children are introduced to place value in preschool, with these beautiful Golden Bead Materials. A unit is one golden bead; a ten is ten beads on a wire; one hundred is ten ten-bead bars in a square, and one thousand is ten hundred squares stacked together.

Notice that the place value is color-coded on the numeral cards: units are green, tens are blue, hundreds are red, and units of thousand are green again. This color-coding for place value also carries through from preschool into upper elementary.

Once children have been shown how to build numbers with the Golden Beads, they enjoy playing “Golden Bead Fetch.” The teacher tells them a number, which they make with the number cards, and for which they find the quantity with the Golden Beads.

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In preschool, we introduce the idea of addition as putting together large numbers. Our four-year-olds take great delight in making big numbers, than collaborating with one or two friends to put all those numbers together, and to figure out how much they have. When they reach ten, they literally carry ten units to the bank to exchange them for one ten bar—carrying made real in a way that sticks, and that’s hard to replicate with just paper and pencil!

They take little numerals for their addends (again, color-coded in place value), and big numerals for the sum. So fun!

Often, children playing around with numbers will “discover” multiplication! They think, let’s just each of us three make the same number. An observant teacher will notice this happening, and (maybe in a conspiratorial, whispering voice) let them know they have discovered multiplication. It’s a rare child who will after this experience not remember, forever, that multiplication is repeated addition!

Once children have had many experience of building numbers, adding and multiplying (and even subtracting and dividing!) with the Golden Beads, where there is one bead for each number, they are guided in moving up one level of abstraction. In the Stamp Game, little wooden stamps stand for numbers. A green stamp with a “1” on it stands for units; a blue stamp with a “10” on it stands for tens, a red stamp with a “100” on it stands for hundreds, and a green stamp with “1,000” on it stands for units of thousands. Children add by building each number with these stamps, then putting all stamps together, and exchanging ten of a lower group for ten of a higher group as needed.

The Bead Frame is the next level of abstraction. In this abacus, little color-coded beads stand for numbers. Preschoolers begin working with this materials, and it is a go-to material in lower elementary—allowing children the comfort of continuity across the program levels.

Remember the colored bead bars from the Teen Board? Well, the same colors continue in the Bead Cabinet. With this materials, young preschoolers count out numbers, labeling them as they go. They discover what squaring is (they actually put the bead chain into a square—e.g., a purple chain of 7×7 beads will square up into a square of 7 by 7). And then they discover that these squares put on top of each other make a cube—and learn about cubing! In elementary, this work continues, and helps children slowly but surely, through skip counting, begin to learn their multiplication facts.

Bridging the ten—adding and subtracting above ten—is a key numeracy skill children need to learn to be able to quickly add and subtract in their minds. The Snake Game is one of several ways children practice this in Montessori preschool and elementary. They make a colored snake of many different colored bead bars, then count up to ten—and exchange each ten they make to a golden ten bar. As they go along, their multi-colored snake converts into gold—and they practice “bridging the ten” repeatedly, joyfully.

As early as age five in preschool/kindergarten, and into the elementary years, children make multiples with the colored bead bars. They make 4, 8, 12, 16 etc. with the right number of yellow bead bars. Then, drawing on the skill of exchanging tens they practiced with the golden beads or the stamp game, they exchange when they get to ten, building the product with golden ten bars and whatever colored bead bar is needed to make the number.

How much is a million? With this Hierarchy of Numbers material, again coded in green, blue and red for units, tens and hundreds, children relate the sizes of a tiny green unit cube—to a huge green million cube. Often, children move beyond that and try to figure out how big a billion would be (1,000 million cubes—how big a square does that make on the floor? How high would ten of these stacked be? Would they fit into our room?).

The Multiplication Checkerboard brings together the place value colors with the bead bars. Children build numbers horizontally and vertically, and then combine them, working out partial products as they go.

These Racks and Tubes are used in our elementary program to help children master long division. Notice how they are, again, color-coded in green, red and blue, carrying over into elementary the same system the children first encountered in their preschool years.

By Upper Elementary, children progress to multiplying not just whole numbers but also decimals. This Decimal Checkerboard builds upon the by-now familiar Multiplication Checkerboard, and allows children to easily transfer their understanding of multiplying whole numbers to decimals. Note the similar color-coding for decimals—albeit in lighter shades of green, red and blue.

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Pastel beads and brightly colored squares make math concepts pop.

Math at LePort Montessori

Montessori Math Highlights in Color

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