Making Teens with 🎃Pumpkin Counters (Montessori Math Intro to Teen Board)

The concept of a numeral can be very abstract for a child. So to make this concrete, we are using Fall-inspired wooden 🎃 pumpkin counters to represent the quantity while building "teens" hands-on. Seeing that number one is small and ten is big allows the child to visually and concretely understand the symbol and its corresponding quantity, which otherwise might seem confusing especially for smaller children.  

In a Montessori Math curriculum, Golden Ten-Bead Bars (buy here) represent the number ten, while colorful beads (buy a set here) represent units: that is numerals one through ten. Although Adrian has been able to count till one hundred even before his third birthday, such counting is mechanical, without understanding a true meaning of numbers, just like reciting a favorite nursing rhyme or a poem. A Teen Board (buy a set here), on the other hand, teaches a child fact families: that numbers are made up of other numbers: a ten bar here, for example, and units (one through 10).  To today, we are counting pumpkins, while making teen-numbers eleven through fifteen.

Number 11= 1 ten-bar + 1 red unit-bead.

In a number 10, the first"1" means that there is just 1 ten-bar & when we add one unit, we get 11.
"There are a lot of pumpkin-counters in the number eleven!"

A child would proceed in a similar fashion, adding to a number ten,pumpkin-counters two through five, making respectively numbers twelve, thirteen, and so on.

For more on math, read a full Teen Board presentation here. Also, you might want to read here "🖐️Sandpaper 🔢 Numbers Extensions (Marbles & 🖍️ Crayons)."

For more on Autumn-themed activities, read here a roundup of all our activities we have done during the month of 🍂September and 🎃October: over 20 of them! arranged by the area of study in a post "🍂Fall & 🎃Halloween Inspired Homeschooling 101 Unit Study."