Secret Decoder Ring

"It is only through careful observation that a teacher may evaluate a child's readiness for a particular lesson, tailoring the curriculum to each child's individual needs."
--Dr. Maria Montessori, Discovery of the Child

In the back of my mind, I've been aware for a while now that I mostly write about what we do together as a class in the afternoons. In doing so, I neglect the wonderful individual, mostly independent work to which the children dedicate our daily three-hour morning work period. I also know that sometimes children are not especially forthcoming about how they spend their hours at school. As a child, when my brother was asked how his day was (on the ride home from the Montessori school he attended), his response was usually, "Fine, fine." What did you do today? "Nothing." His stories have eked out over the decades since, but other parents may encounter similar reticence. I would hate for families to believe that we do "nothing." So much goes on that I sometimes feel as if I am choreographing an elaborate (though structured) circus! At any given time throughout the morning, almost every child may have out a different piece of work.

After we spent part of our week discussing coded ways of sharing cultural stories through art, it occurred to me that even parents with more talkative children are hearing seemingly coded versions of what their children are doing at school. "So you say you did Teddy Bears?" "You worked with Golden Beads?" "The Colored Bead what?" So what are all those first graders doing? For this, I offer you your very own Secret Decoder Ring:

OPERATIONS
One of Montessori's greatest strengths is in the brilliantly well-designed math materials. Each successive piece of work leads the child to take one small step to greater complexity. The idea is to get an in-depth understanding of how numbers work and what it means to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. In the case of first graders, right now we're working to really understand the concept of addition. With the Montessori "Operations" strand, we're always working with big numbers, usually at least into the thousands. For older children, they're solving problems into the tens of thousands and even millions.

Golden Beads
The Golden Beads are the most concrete of the Operations materials, and they provide wonderful physical representations of place value. Many mainstream classrooms now use "base ten blocks," copied from Maria Montessori's "Golden Beads." Right now, first graders are using the beads to understand addition and beginning a very concrete introduction to "exchanges" (often referred to in mainstream classrooms as "borrowing" and "carrying"). First graders will eventually use the same materials to learn how to subtract, multiply, and divide.



FACTS
Ultimately, the goal of the Montessori "Facts" strand is for children to learn math facts, but we don't begin with flashcards and memorization. In fact, I often caution parents to shy away from memorization at the start of first grade. At first, the children are exploring addition and subtraction with objects they can count, working with the concepts of combining and separating groups, and noticing patterns. For first graders, I alternate back and forth between addition and subtraction facts lessons so that they have a firm understanding of both before the Stanford test in January. With so many first graders, right now we have students working with four different hands-on materials:

Colored Bead Stair
This work is important, not only for guiding practice with horizontal addend combinations but also because knowing the colors of these beads will be helpful when we use them later for exploration of algebraic formulas and in numeration work with the Bead Cabinet chains.


String Beads
Vertical addition facts
The appropriate number of beads are pulled from the top to the bottom of the string and then counted. This is something that easily could be made for home practice.





Teddy Bears
Horizontal subtraction facts






Unifix Cubes
Vertical subtraction facts







NUMERATION
First graders are working with linear counting. We are also noticing patterns in numbers.


Hundred Board








Odd & Even










Square Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . photo coming soon!





FRACTIONS
We introduce fractions in a very concrete way. We start with the red "one" bead from the Bead Cabinet. The children are shown that if the bead were squashed like a ball of clay, it would look something like our red "whole" fraction circle. We then discuss "fair shares" and numerators and denominators. The children spend some time learning to name and record fractions. Next week, many will begin adding fractions with like denominators (1/4 + 2/4, for example), which will also reinforce addition facts practice.



Clock Work
You may have already read about our beautiful new Montessori Teaching Clock. After the introductory lesson, children practice matching clocks with their associated times.






GEOMETRY
We begin with tangrams, which we refer to as "Shape Pictures." The idea here is to give the children some comfortable, engaging work as they settle into a busy work cycle. The tangrams also help the children begin to view shapes as constructors of other shapes.

Polygons in the "Geometric Cabinet": We give children the etymology of "polygons," explaining that they are straight-sided shapes with "many corners." The children then begin a series of activities that lead them to identify pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, octagons, and nonagons--with the aid of the Greek and Latin etymologies of the names.

SCIENCE
Classification: Living/Non-living and Plant/Animal
Much of the science work on our shelves is based in classification and nomenclature. First graders begin by classifying picture cards as living or non-living and then as plant or animal. To add another level of depth and provide a way for children to record this work, I have incorporated bar graphs into most of the classification work on our shelves.

Sequencing Planets

LANGUAGE ARTS
Movable Alphabet
Most of our first graders arrive as strong readers. This is one of the assets of receiving first graders who have been in our Montessori program since the age of 3. They have already been exposed to a huge number of reading readiness activities, and they have been lead naturally into reading. I rarely have to teach a child how to read. Mostly, the work of Montessori lower elementary (grades 1, 2, & 3) is using reading to learn. The children who have been in our program before they join me as first graders will have already used the Movable Alphabet to build words. Writing and reading go hand-in-hand (often with children writing before they read!). We use the Movable Alphabet in first grade to work with spelling patterns. First graders are working with "sh" and "ch" and some have moved onto "ai" and "ay."


Grammar: Function of Words
The children are introduced to each part of speech, one at a time. We begin with the noun. The children learn that "noun" comes from the Latin "nomen," meaning name. Nouns are naming words. The first words ever used were probably nouns. This is certainly true as babies begin to talk, pointing and naming everything in sight. Each part of speech is given a concrete symbol. Because nouns are probably the oldest type of words, it is symbolized with a black pyramid--black to represent coal (formed millions of years ago) and the shape in honor of the age of the pyramids.


Word Study
Word study begins with alphabetizing. The children learn to organize groups of words in order of the alphabet.

WRITING
Journals
We begin each day with writing. The children arrive to find a "love note" from me, welcoming them to our learning community and describing what I'd like for them to discuss in their journals. (This is also a sneaky way for me to incorporate environmental print that the children must read on a daily basis!) Often, the journal topic is a reflection on the previous day's group lesson. The children cheer when the topic is "author's choice," meaning they, the authors, can choose any topic for their morning writing.


Research
First graders are introduced to research with "name research." They begin by finding their own name in a book of baby names, and they each learn the etymology of their name and its language of origin. Writing also includes creative stories and letters (birthday pages, thank you's, letters with questions for experts, and notes to our pen-pals at another public Montessori school).