Age
3-6
Materials
- Montessori Number Rods.
- Large felt mat for floor exercise.
Preparation
Presentation
- Directress places the rods at random on the mat.
- Directress shows the child how to build the stairs with the first three rods.
- Then she invites the child to continue building the rest.
- When completed, Directress takes the first 3 rods and go through "The Three Period Lesson" and introduces the names "one, two, three" in association with the quantities one, two, three.
The First Period
She points to the first rod and say "This one". (The Directress encourages the child to repeat the name after her and says, 'Can you say one?') She then points to the second rod and say "This is two". An then to the third rod and say "This is three".
The Second Period
Directress then says to the child "Show me 1" and the child will probably point to the first rod. "Show me 2", and so on.
The Third Period
Directress jumbles up the rods and place at random on the table. She then points to any one rods and say "What is this?" and the child answer. She repeats for the other two rods.
Control Of Error
If the stair is correctly build the child will be able to name the rods from one to ten in the correct order. If the stair is built incorrectly, the stair will not be a smooth ascending stair, so visually, the child could see that it was not built correctly.
Points Of Interest
Gradually, the child will learn up to 10 with the introduction of three rods at a time, with one rod from the previous lesson and two new ones. For e.g. One, two, three in the first lesson and three, four, five in the second and so on until ten. If the child forgets some of them, use the three Period Lesson to teach him again. Remember to count slowly.
Purpose
- Introduce the child to fix quantity.
- Introduce the child to counting from 1 to 10 using whole quantities, e.g. 2 as a whole.
- Awareness of the sequence of numbers 1 to 10.
- Awareness of the quantitative relationship between numbers, e.g. 2 is more than 1 and 3 is more than 2., etc.
- Awareness of the concept of numbers as an aggregate of 1's (e.g. the child can check this by counting the rods).
- Introduce the verbal number names and their quantity from 1-10.
Variation
- Instead of building the stair the method shown above, we can also build them vertically.
- Play a game. Ask the child to close their eyes. Directress takes away one rod. Ask child to open their eyes and find which is missing.
