Your 4-year-old counts to twenty in the car, loud and proud. Then you ask for three forks at dinner and get a handful. If you have ever wondered whether you should be doing more, or whether you are already too late, you are not alone. Most of us were taught that math is worksheets and right answers, and many of us still carry the feeling that numbers are for other people.
This talk is part of our ongoing series inside the Childhood Potential Club, where members gain access to expert LiveTalks, the full recordings with live Q&A, and a growing library of over 200 videos on Montessori and conscious parenting. Our guest, Maren Schmidt, is an award-winning Montessori teacher and the author of Understanding Montessori: A Guide for Parents. In this talk she shows how children between 3 and 6 really come to understand numbers, and how much of it you can support at home without buying a classroom.
Math is more than counting out loud
Maren starts with a definition: mathematics is a language we use to talk about quantity, structure, space and change. Number sense, she says, grows out of our experiences in the physical world, which is why two people can hear the same number and see completely different things in it.
She also names five misconceptions many of us picked up at school: that math is nothing more than computation, that it has to be learned in one strict order, that it has nothing to do with stories, that it is only for the chosen few, and that it limits us. The rest of the talk takes them apart one by one.
Where the pink tower came from
One of the loveliest parts of the talk is the history. The cubes of the pink tower echo the wooden weights a butcher once put on the scales, and the largest cube is a full kilogram. The knobbed cylinders were based on apothecary weights. The spindles in the spindle boxes were the spindles used for spinning wool. Children loved them because they were handling real adult tools.
“Dr. Montessori turned everyday materials into teaching materials,” Maren says, “and I believe we can too.”
Why a broken candy cane feels like less
Young children see length as quantity. One long stick looks like more than three short pieces, even when it is the same amount. Montessori materials start exactly there: the red rods and number rods let a child feel quantity as length, and the spindle boxes then move from length to counting separate objects. The spindle boxes also bring in zero, which Maren used to call the most powerful number in the world with her older students.
Number, numeral, quantity
A lot of math confusion, in children and adults, comes from three words we use as if they meant the same thing. Quantity is the amount of objects in front of you. Numerals are the symbols 0 to 9. Numbers are how we write any quantity using those symbols. When we are clear about which one we mean, children have a much easier time connecting what they hold in their hands with what they see on paper.
Get to ten first
If you take one thing from this talk, Maren wants it to be this: the quantities and symbols from zero to ten are the foundation, and they are worth all the time they take. Once a child truly has them, the work can go in many directions at once, and it follows the child’s interest. The children and adults she has tutored who struggle with math are nearly always the ones for whom quantity and symbol never became firmly attached.
How do you know your child is there? Play her memory game. Write the numbers on slips of paper, fold them into a bowl, and let your child draw one and bring you that many spoons, without telling you the number. If the spoons and the slip match, they are ready for the next step, and nobody has been rushed.
What you can make at home
Maren is practical about materials. Number rods can cost around two hundred dollars. Her counting trains do a similar job with jumbo craft sticks, about 15 centimeters long, for very little money. A spindle box can be ten small containers at about a dollar each, with a number taped to each one, and the spindles can be pencils, chopsticks or spoons.
For fractions she reaches for the kitchen: measuring cups, water, a half, a quarter, an eighth. And for the book Picture Pie by Ed Emberley, where every animal is built from circles cut into halves, quarters and eighths. Number stories work the same way. Tell your child about the three tomatoes, six green beans and four ears of corn you picked, and let them count it out with buttons or beads.
“Even Montessori didn’t have the Montessori materials,” she says. She was using what she had available.
Meet Maren Schmidt
Maren Schmidt, M.Ed., is an award-winning Montessori teacher and author. An AMI-trained elementary guide, she founded her own Montessori school and has lived nearly every Montessori role there is: parent, teacher, school administrator, and now grandparent. Since 2005 she has written the Kids Talk blog and newsletters, read by Montessori families and school communities around the world. She is the author of Understanding Montessori: A Guide for Parents and Building Cathedrals Not Walls.
