Multiplication - skip counting and Montessori materials

Bear does skip counting every week at Classical Conversations.  They sing songs to memorize this.  They skip count all the way to the 15's and then learn the squares and cubes.  I decided to show Bear how what she was memorizing was related to some of our Montessori materials.

We took out our bead chains - the eights.

Next (not on the same day - actually weeks later), I took out the multiplication board (which I have had printed out from Montessori for Everyone for a year!) and the red pushpins. Bear caught on right away and even realized that she didn't need to push the pins in the board to find her answers; she could just sing them.

So this week, I introduced multiplication with the stamp game.

Here she is taking 46 three times.  She finds the answers by skip counting - she came up with doing it that way on her own. In the above example she sang 6,12, 18 and then traded ten out.  Then she skip counted the 4 tens - 4, 8, 12 and had to trade.  This was her last question of the day but before it I had presented how to do multiplication with trading.  She can do multiplication with these concrete materials, but has no idea how to follow the algorithm on paper, nor do  I expect her to for a few years.

Linked to Montessori Monday at Living Montessori Now.