Term 4, 2024: Learning times-tables…

Children work with bead chains for the first time at pre-school, using colour coded labels, they learn to count-on. At primary school, they continue with counting-on, for as long as they feel that they can go on. Then the bead chains are used again to strengthen children’s understanding for multiplication, fractions, squaring & cubing. 

Young children spend a lot of time sorting labels because that’s where they’re at, but older children should be developing skills with counting-on, thinking of how to write a number, reasoning and persevering at learning to count independently. If they are working like this, they’ll stay engaged, they won’t be overwhelmed by a huge pile of tickets, and they’ll stay counting for as long as they need the practice – they won’t feel that it is “baby” work. In the lessons, we give the etymology for “multiple” = to fold (and we discuss the meaning “to pleat”; the suffix “-ple” means to fold an exact number of times with nothing left over).

The children created an 8-pointed star with the long chain of “multiples of 4”, this was possible because the chain of 4, is really 4x4x4, so the star folds up neatly into 8 points, each point uses two bead bars of 4.

The Montessori materials are “keys” that children use to unlock these discoveries for themselves, so after starting the children off, we leave them to it so that we can observe how they’re counting beads to determine multiples, some strategies are more effective than others – it takes time to learn this, and children need to be discovering these patterns on their own.