Montessori Work Stations

Montessori classrooms use materials chosen specifically to teach various concepts. Each resource, or workstation, is used over and over to learn different concepts. This means that the same resources may be used by different students of various ages for different applications. It can be difficult to separate the materials used by one age group or another.

Montessori Learning Resources

To illustrate how the Montessori method uses learning materials, we will look at two common resources: The Pink Tower, and the Golden Beads.

·        The Pink Tower
This is a set of ordinary building blocks of differing sizes. Colors are often used as part of the identification process because it helps children learn to identify colors and teaches them an important lesson about using descriptive vocabulary.

o   3 to 6 Years - During the early years of Montessori, the Pink Tower blocks are used as traditional building blocks, but they can also serve as a tool for counting, sorting, and more.

o   6 to 9 Years - Those same learning blocks can be applied to learning math, studying the laws of physics, or adapted for use in other projects such as tracing shapes.

o   9 to 12 Years - By the third stage of elementary education, most students have moved away from playing with blocks, but the Pink Tower can be applied to higher learning skills such as geometry and other abstract concepts.

·        The Golden Beads
This set of tools is composed of beads in 4 patterns: A single bead, a string of 10 beads, a square of 100 beads, and a cube of 1000 beads. These divisions are vital to the applications the resource was designed for.

o   3 to 6 Years - The younger children can use Golden Beads to learn to count, and the division of the beads allows children to quickly and easily grasp the decimal pattern of counting, where each new number bracket is composed of 10 of the previous division.

o   6 to 9 Years - The Golden Beads are perfect for learning the basics of multiplication, division, and comparison of sets.

o   9 to 12 Years - Those same beads transform into a tool for understanding spatial concepts, advanced patterns, and the intricacies of such ideas as calculating volume and calculating dimensions.

The Montessori resources discussed here are only two of the many workstations which populate the Montessori classroom. They were used to illustrate how simple learning toys can be used to teach a range of lessons at multiple age levels. As with all Montessori materials, they were carefully chosen to fill multiple roles while teaching children important educational concepts.  The Montessori School of Fremont invites families in to see the Montessori environment first hand.  Contact us today to schedule a tour.