Blog Layout
What are bead chains? Are they jewelry? #confused
Oct 04, 2021
Nope, not jewelry! But these colorful materials are beautifully designed to catch children’s eye, like all Montessori materials! The bead chains are a set of shorter and longer chains of beads with repeated groups of the numbers 1 thought 10. They can be found in most Montessori classrooms, and are part of the bead cabinet, which is used in different ways in Primary, Lower Elementary and Upper Elementary to strengthen number sense in developmentally appropriate ways.
The bead cabinet is a perfect example of a material which indirectly prepares children at a young age for higher abstract work when they are older. In Primary, children have lessons on using the bead chains for counting and skip-counting. In Lower Elementary, children use the bead chains to find multiples, common multiples, and learn about the concept and value of squares and cubes of numbers.
Still later, in Upper El, children will relate their knowledge of squares and cubes (that all started with the bead cabinet) to work more abstractly, calculating with squares and cubes and even finding square and cube roots!
Montessori materials are aids to abstraction, as they bring abstract concepts to children in a concrete way.
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