written by Bailey Taylor, Otter Tail guide
The human mind is inherently mathematical. Mario Montessori described mathematics as the ‘second language of man’, and the word itself comes from the Greek word ‘to learn’. Creating order within the mind is the developmental imperative of the elementary child, and it is through work that is naturally precise that the child builds up the powers of reasoning and imagination, or abstraction.
Montessori children understand not only the process of an operation, but why it is so, because they have explored it with the materials, and when a child discovers these patterns for themselves, it is a joyful experience. For example, elementary children are positively tickled when they find that fraction division results in a larger quotient than the number they began with, while division of whole numbers will always equal a smaller one.
It is this creative repetition that results in what we call number fluency, which means a child can think flexibly about numbers, much as they would if they grew from parroting foreign phrases to the mastery of a new language. Any of us who have experienced learning a new language know how taxing it can be to carry on a conversation while decoding or translating each word or phrase. A child with mathematical fluency will revel at the patterns in cubing, but the child who is skip-counting their way through the first term in the formula will not have the same opportunity.
The last few years have challenged our children’s natural construction of the mathematical mind, and this fall we have had to get creative as we both build back fluency and continue to explore complex patterns with numbers. In upper elementary, we have focused on automaticity with operations. Like everything we do, we have approached this task with the developmental characteristics of the elementary child in mind, and what does a child love more than a challenge and a race against time? This winter Great River students have been experimenting with completing as many facts as they can in three minutes, and throughout the work cycle you can hear children exclaim to their friends “time me again, I think I can get a few more on this one!”
You can look forward to hearing about how this work is going for your child in their upcoming progress report, and we should continue to invest our precious time and energy in the development of fluency both at home and at school this year, so that everyone has the opportunity to experience the joy that comes with the construction of the mathematical mind!