I pretended to be a raccoon today!

That was a lot of math for one day... After going through all the didactical characteristics of Montessori materials, possible ground rules (I particularly liked one school-wide ground rule another student brought up, "Be safe, kind, and gentle"), and the sensitive periods, we did math.

Lots of math. How the child learns to count linearly, recognize the numerals, get the concepts of zero, teens, tens, hundreds, the decimal system, etc. The golden beads amaze me. It starts with just one golden bead, and the child learns that that is one unit (just like you could have a unit of shoe, or a unit of pencil). Then they can use ten of those units, to equal a ten bar, and then ten of the ten bars can equal a hundred square, then ten of those is the same as a thousand cube (which can also be formed by the thousand chain), and so on and so forth. It's pretty mesmerizing. Everything is incredibly well thought-out and connects with the other materials (color coding beyond just the golden beads) so that it is more concrete and interrelated for the child. We were able to add, subtract, multiply and divide large numbers (in the thousands) without using any paper or pencil. We just used the Montessori materials to concretely find the answer, even if it involved exchanging or carrying. (In a subtraction game, I got to be the raccoon who steals hot dogs from a sleeping family, because she has lots of hungry babies at home (i.e. I stole the certain amount that we wanted to subtract from our original number)! In the morning, the campers had to figure out how many hot dogs they had left. The bank game was particularly helpful, because it helped me change out ten bars and hundreds so I could steal the correct amount (just enough for my number of babies... which was about 2784 or something like that... yikes).

Of course, we also got to see a little slide show about Maria Montessori; it was really neat to see the pictures of her family, and of Maria herself at the age of ten, when she was "supposed" to be finished with school, when she graduated the equivalent of high school at sixteen, when she graduated from med school, and when her first book was published.

Anyway, it's been quite the week! I learned a LOT about the 3-6 world, and am just even more excited about starting the birth-3 classes on Monday. Meanwhile, I'm going into NYC tomorrow to do some touring around with a group from CMTE-NY, and also meeting up with my cousin Joachim! So it should be a fun-filled day. :)

Today's quote: "I'm so gushy I practically need duct tape over my mouth." (In reference to holding back distracting praise of a student's work)