The Mathematical Mind

"That the mathematical mind is active from the first, becomes apparent not only from the attraction that exactitude exerts on every action the child performs, but we see it also in the fact that the little child's need for order is one of the most powerful incentives to dominate his early life." -Maria Montessori

The sensory impressions that the child gathers through his/her work with the practical life and sensorial curricula are retrieved during work with the concrete apparatus of the math curriculum. It is through the use of the Practical Life activities, such as the fine motor exercises, that the child's inner concentration, cooperation, independence and sense of order are developed. The child's senses are prepared through the Sensorial materials to discriminate between materials, such as working with the length rods creating a sensory impression of increasing and decreasing which is later used in the mathematics curriculum with the numbers rods which increase by units of one.

The mathematics materials like the other curriculum areas are logical and ordered. There is a natural progression of challenge from one lesson to the next, which follows the natural instincts of the child. This logical, ordered curriculum not only isolates a particular mathematical concept with the use of a particular lesson, but each lesson uses the skills that the child has attained through previous work and builds on those skills.

Numeration 1-9 1:1 correspondence

linear counting with the hundreds board

Decimal System (base 10) place value, correspondence of the bead material to symbol

 Passage to abstraction -using the stamp game to add complex numbers.