Catching Up With Our Four Year Olds ~ Part 2

Here is part two of our post highlighting some of the Montessori work activities our four year olds are doing in our classrooms.

The Hundred Board

A. and E. are working with the Hundred Board.  Both girls can count and write their numbers to one hundred.  They are also working with the Golden Bead Material (see Catching Up With Our Four Year Olds ~ Part 1) to form complex numbers up to 9,999.

The Hundred Board challenges the child to order individual numbers from one to one hundred.



A. & E. have spread out one hundred wooden tiles numbered 1 to 100 on their mat.  The blue board in the photograph is the Hundred Board.  It is a square divided into ten rows with ten small squares in each row. 

A. and E. are sorting the tiles into piles of ten beginning with the units, then the teens, twenties, thirties. etc.

A. & E. take turns finding the individual tiles and setting them out on the Hundred Board in order.  In these photographs the girls are setting out the number tiles in the thirties.

This is a photograph of their finished work.

The Teens Board ~ An Introduction to Numbers 11 to 19

C. and L. are working with the Teens Board.  The purpose of this material is to associate the names 'eleven' to 'nineteen' with their quantities and symbols, and to combine their symbols.

C. and L. have already worked individually with quantities and symbols and are now combining them.  The Teens Boards are two boards divided into five compartments each.  Nine of these compartments have a large ten printed in black.  There are nine tablets with the numbers 1 to 9 printed on them.  The short bead stair consisting of numbers 1 to 9 and nine ten bead bars are also part of this material.

In this photograph, C. and L. have placed the two boards in a vertical line.  They have set out a ten bead bar running left and right, to the right of each number ten.  

The following photographs show the boys forming numbers 11 to 15.  To form 11, a unit bead is placed to the right of the ten bead bar.  The number one tablet is slid across the number ten to rest on the zero, forming 11.  This is done in the same way down through 19.



Printing

Our four year olds and many of our three year olds are dilligently working on the proper formation of lowercase and uppercase letters.  This work begins with the Sandpaper Letters and the unlined chalkboard and eventually progresses to lined paper.  More of this process will be explained in  'Catching Up With Our Three Year Olds'.

In the following photographs, S. is practicing the letter o on unlined paper.