If you like this style of learning tools as well and are interested in free, printable versions of the multiplication and division Montessori learning tools, sign up for my newsletter to stay up-to-date (and receive some free educational printables). The more advanced math learning tools are on my near term to-do list.

Recommended Age Range: Preschool, Kindergarten, Early Elementary
Time Required: Less than 1 hour
Difficultly: Easy
Cost: Free printable, less than $2 in used supplies

Materials:

• Printed Subtraction Strip Board document
• Optional: Printed Subtraction Tables and Subtraction Tables – Mixed Up
• Optional: Printed Subtraction Chart document
• 3 laminating pouches
• 1 sheet of poster board (I used a 14″x22″ sheet, though it will be trimmed to roughly 5″x18″)

Supplies & Tools:

• laminator
• scissors
• paper trimmer (optional)
• glue stick

Instructions:

1. Print out the Subtraction Strip Board document.
2. Laminate all 3 sheets.

1. Cut out both halves of the subtraction strip board and the long white strip as well as the 9 numbered pieces.

1. Glue both halves of the Subtraction Strip Board onto the poster board and cut out. Repeat process with the long white strip.

1. Print out the supplemental worksheets to be used with the board: Subtraction Tables, Subtraction Tables-Mixed Up, & Subtraction Chart

To use the subtraction board, use the long, white strip to cover up all the numbers past the first number in the problem (the big number). For example, if the problem is 14 minus something, the child would use the white strip to cover up the number 15 and beyond as shown.

Next the child would find the blue strip corresponding to the number that is being subtracted and place that next to the white strip. For example, if the problem is 11 minus 5, first the child would use the long, white strip to cover up the numbers 12 through 18. Then he would find the blue strip consisting of 5 squares and place this 5-strip next to the white strip which would cover up numbers 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. The numbers remaining would be 1 through 6. Therefore, the answer to the problem would be 6, as shown.

To use the supplemental worksheets, I recommend starting with Subtraction Table: Ones and progressing through Subtraction Table: Nines if this seems to be at your child’s level. If your child quickly realizes that there is a pattern to the answers and stops thinking about what the problems actually mean, you might want to skip to the Mixed Up Subtraction Tables to give them more practice using the board. Lastly, you can have your child fill out the Subtraction Chart. To use the chart the child picks an empty box and subtracts the number to the right of that box from the number straight above. An answer key is provided. In this case it is completely okay, even desirable, for your child to realize that there is a pattern to the table.

Related Links

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I recently decided to try homeschooling my oldest child for kindergarten rather than continuing to send him to the Montessori school he’s been attending for the past couple years. However, I still want him to have exposure to all the wonderful Montessori tools. Granted, we just started homeschooling a week ago, so he still has a lot of enthusiasm in general, but he loves using this board and the associated strips to add single digit numbers together. We haven’t attempted the full addition chart yet, but he’s done many of the tables, and I’m confident that he understands the concept of addition. He’s even getting better at adding numbers together in his head.

Full instructions for creating and using the board and associated worksheets are below.

Recommended Age Range: Preschool, Kindergarten
Time Required: Less than 1 hour
Difficultly: Easy
Cost: Free printable, less than $2 in used supplies

Materials:

• Printed Addition Strip Board document
• Optional: Printed Addition Tables and Addition Tables – Mixed Up
• Optional: Printed Addition Chart document
• 6 laminating pouches
• 1 sheet of poster board (I used a 14″x22″ sheet, though it will be trimmed to roughly 13″x18″)

Supplies & Tools:

• laminator
• scissors
• glue stick

Instructions:

1. Print out the Addition Strip Board document.
2. Laminate all 6 sheets.

1. Cut out the 18 addition strips (9 red and 9 blue) and set aside in an envelope or Ziploc bag.
2. Cut out the 4 sections of the addition strip board.

1. Glue the 4 sections onto the poster board
2. Trim the extra poster board.
3. Print out the supplemental worksheets to be used with the board: Addition Tables, Addition Tables-Mixed Up, Addition Chart

To use the board, start with Addition Table: Ones. Have your child find the blue “1” square and place it in the upper left corner. Next have them find the red “1” square and place it next to the blue one square. Looking at the top row of numbers, they will see that their 1 blue square and 1 red square has brought them to the number “2”. They then can write the number 2 on the 1+1 line.

Next they leave their red square where it is, but move the blue “1” square down to the next row. Since the next problem on their worksheet is 1+2, they find the red “2” square and place it next to the blue “1” square to see that 1+2=3. They can keep moving down the board until their worksheet is complete.

After doing a few of these tables, they might realize that there is a pattern and that they can “cheat” by just adding 1 to their previous answer. For example, the answer on the Addition Table: Ones worksheet are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Since my son realized this right away, I also made an optional Addition Tables: Mixed-Up version that requires them to actually prove that they understand how to add. This is not an actual Montessori tool, so your child won’t be missing the full experience if they skip it.

My son also does not like using all the rows on his Addition Strip Board, so I let him use whatever row he wants when completing his worksheets. He frequently just uses the top row for every problem.

After a child is good at doing their addition tables, they might want to attempt the full Addition Chart. To use the addition chart, you write the number in each box for the sum of the corresponding row and column. So, for example, when filling out row 4, the first box is 4+1 since it is in row 4, column 1, the second box is 4+2 since it is in row 4, column 2 and so on. A completed chart is included so that the child can compare their answers. A child may or may not need to use the addition strip board to fill out the chart depending on their abilities.

Click here for more Addition and Subtraction activities for kids.

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My kids love doing Easter egg hunts at Easter so much that we sort of do them all year round, particularly in the months leading up to and following Easter. However, what I don’t like about Easter egg hunts is that we used to always fill the eggs with food. Since we do them so frequently, I’d moved away from candy and cookies and started filling them with things like stickers, goldfish crackers, raisins, and yogurt melts. (Even better is when I get my kids to fill them instead. Then all I have to do is hide them.) However, I still don’t love the idea of them filling themselves up before dinner on raisins and crackers, even if it is a better situation than when they gorged themselves on jelly beans and mini Oreos.

This year, I came up with an improvement which has worked out REALLY well. I bought a roll of 2000 raffle tickets for $3 and started filling the eggs with raffle tickets instead of treats. I also bought a bunch of cheap prizes like pencils, Hot Wheels, inflatable beach balls, and rubber stamps and put them in a shoe box. Now, after they play each game they can use their tickets to “buy” a prize, Chuck E. Cheese style. This has worked out well for so many reasons. 1) No more edible treats. 2) It’s such a great opportunity to practice math skills (counting, number recognition, even addition and subtraction). 3) They’re also getting practice with money concepts and learning that if they save their tickets from one game to the next, they can earn an even bigger prize. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner.

Recommended Age Range: Preschool, Kindergarten
Time Required: ~1 hour for initial setup. Subsequent games are about 10 minutes to fill eggs and hide them plus another 5 minutes to help them count their tickets and choose a prize (per child).
Difficulty: Super Easy
Cost: About $5 to buy raffle tickets and sticker labels for writing “prices.” I got a little carried away buying prizes and spent about $30 or $40, but honestly, I think you could get by spending maybe $10 to start. I estimate the prizes I bought will last at least a year. We already have way too many Easter baskets and plastic eggs, but you will need those as well.

Materials:

• roll of raffle tickets
• sticker labels (I used Avery Color Coding Labels)
• plastic eggs
• basket (or other container/bag to collect eggs in)
• shoe box
• prizes (The best deal is to buy packs, like gift bag packs of toy airplanes or stationary packs with pencils, sharpeners, erasers, and note pads, then divide them up into multiple prizes.)

Supplies & Tools:

• A sharpie or other marker

Instructions:

1. The first time you play, add sticker labels to all your prizes and write a “price” on each one. I roughly did a third to half the number of cents that each prize cost. For example, a Hot Wheels car cost $1, so I made the label say anywhere from 33 to 50. I tried to vary the numbers even for the same type of prize so that my preschooler would have more opportunity to recognize different numbers (i.e. similar cars for 33, 37, and 44 instead of all of them being worth the same number of tickets). Another advantage of this which I didn’t anticipate is that my 5 year old has figured out to look through the box to find the best “deal” for what he wants.
2. Place all the prizes in the shoe box and, if you want, label the box with a sign that says “Prizes”.
3. Each game, you will need to fill the eggs with a few raffle tickets. I placed between 1 and 5 in each one, so that there would be some variety. Most commonly I put either 2 or 3.
4. Hide the eggs.
5. Give each kids a basket and say “Ready. Set. GO!”
6. After they are done hunting, help them count their eggs and “buy” prizes.

Click here for more Addition and Subtraction activities for kids.

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I read about this style of number cards in the book, Teaching Montessori in the Home: The School Years (Affiliate Link), and thought it was a really clever idea. Basically you just stack the cards on top of each other to make any number with each card representing either the thousands, hundreds, tens, or unit place. Then you can take a number (like 7401) and dissect it into its component parts (7 thousands + 4 hundreds + no tens + 1 unit). If you combine these cards with the Montessori Golden Beads, they become even more meaningful. I made a free, downloadable printout to make it extra easy to make a set of these cards, but you could also write the numbers by hand on cardstock or note cards cut to a workable size.

Recommended Age Range: Kindergarten and Early Elementary
Time Required: ~30 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: Practically free, though cardstock can be a little expensive if you have to buy a whole pack. However, you’ll only need 3 sheets.

Materials:

• 3 Sheets of Card Stock (I used 110 lb weight paper, but any heavy paper would work. You could also use regular paper and laminate it after printing, but that would obviously be more time-consuming.)
• Number-Symbol Cards document (You might need a free Adobe Acrobat reader if your computer does not already know how to read pdf files.)

Supplies & Tools:

• Printer
• Scissors

Instructions:

1. Print the Number Symbol Cards document onto card stock.
2. Cut along black lines.

There are many ways to use these cards. Since at present I work mainly with a kindergartener, we only use the tens and the units place cards, and take turns making and reading numbers. If you have Montessori bead material, you can use the beads to illustrate exactly what each number means.

Click here for more Counting and Number Recognition activities for kids.

Related Links

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I decided to make the Montessori colored bead stair after I had already made my own imitation “golden” (actually white) beads. So far, the colored beads representing each number between 1 and 9 are not actually necessary, since the child can just count out the appropriate number of single golden beads. However, they are a handy shortcut that keep the child interested in whatever we’re doing.

If I expected my kid to count out 9 single beads every time he wanted to represent 9 (which I already know he’s capable of doing), he would get bored really fast and find the whole exercise too tedious. However, if he can just grab a 9-bar out of our set of colored beads, he’s likely to stay interested much longer.

Recommended Age Range: Preschool, Kindergarten, Early Elementary
Time Required: Each bar takes about 1-2 minutes to make depending on the length. With one 500 pack of beads of various colors, I was able to make ten each of 2-,3-,and 4-bars, nine 5-bars, six 6- and 7- bars, and five 8- and 9-bars, or about 60 bars. Therefore, the total time was approximately 1-2 hours. At some point I will likely buy another 500 pack of beads so that I can have 10 of each length for when my kids are learning multiplication. Completing my set will likely take less than an hour.
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: Less than $5 in used supplies (I had already bought fishing line and wire for the Montessori “Golden” Beads and only a minimal amount of each was used for this project. I used a 500 pack of faceted, 8 mm, plastic beads of various colors from my local craft store, which cost $2.69 after using a 40% off coupon. I will likely someday buy another pack so that I can have at least 10 of each length bar. A 900 pack of similar beads (Affiliate Link) are available on Amazon for $4.99 presently.)

Materials:

• 500-1000 pack of beads of various colors
• wire (I used a 175 ft spool of 20 gauge galvanized steel wire from the hardware store, but any similar gauge would likely work. I estimate to make 10 of each length bar using 8 mm beads would require less than 25 ft.)

Supplies & Tools:

• small diagonal wire cutters
• needle nose pliers
• ruler

Instructions:

1. First, sort all your beads by color. My variety pack had 12 colors, so I used an egg carton to sort them.
2. Decide which color will represent each length bar, using the most plentiful colors for the largest bars.
3. For each number bar, you could experiment to see what the desired length of wire is, then use a ruler to measure out the desired number of wire pieces for that length. However, I chose to first thread the desired number of beads onto the wire spool.



4. Curl the end of the wire using the tip of the needle nose pliers in order to hold the beads on the wire.



5. Cut the wire leaving an extra length to be curled. For me the ideal extra length was about the length of one bead (or around 1 cm), though this might vary from person to person depending on the tool and technique used to bend the wire.



6. Curl the end of the wire to hold all the beads together.



7. Repeat in order to have bars 2 to 9 beads long, with each length being represented by a different color. Make as many as you can of each length (up to 10) based on the number of beads you have of each color.

I made a special box to hold all my bead material, but they could be stored in a wide variety of ways (including in a Ziploc bag).

There are many things you can do with the colored beads. In addition to letting your child make them into a triangle, you could also use them with Montessori Number Symbol Cards or Seguin Boards.

Click here for more Counting and Number Recognition activities for kids.

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I briefly looked into purchasing a set, but that turned out to be cost-prohibitive. Undeterred, I decided to try making my own. Unfortunately, I quickly realized I had two options: pretty or cheap. While I really wanted to use perfectly round, hand-painted, wooden beads, I didn’t want to pay that much. Especially, when I wasn’t even sure how well the whole endeavor would work out. Therefore, I decided to go the cheap route. I bought faceted, plastic, 8 mm beads off Amazon in the least expensive color available at the time.

Next, I had a little trouble finding the plastic mesh/canvas that many people use to hold the hundred squares and thousand cubes together. I eventually found some at my local craft store, but by that time I had already made a hundred square by stringing together my ten bars with fishing line. As expected, my fishing line squares ended up floppy. Afterwards, I made one hundred square using the plastic mesh. Next, I spent a day trying to decide which I liked better. Both ways took about the same amount of time. Being a very organized, structured person, the rigidity of the plastic mesh appealed to me.

My husband on the other hand liked the floppy square better saying it was a more interesting object to manipulate. I ended up deciding to go with the floppy squares when my 4 year old squished one of the hundred squares in his hand and asked, “How many is it now?” I was a little surprised it wasn’t obvious to him. However, I was able to convince him that if it was a hundred beads when it was flat, it was still a hundred beads when you folded it in half, or rolled it up, or manipulated it any way you wanted. The floppy squares ended up being more useful conceptually.

The last decision was how many to make. I may add to my collection at some point, but for now, I decided to make 1 thousand cube (mainly just because you only need one to explain the concept of a thousand and they’re obviously very time-consuming to make), 10 hundred squares (to show how the hundreds add together to make a thousand), and 55 ten bars (which allows me to demonstrate 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 all at the same time). Making all of this required 2550 beads. Since I bought 3000 I have 450 left over to use as singles (minus some that my kids lost).

Recommended Age Range: Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary
Time Required: For me, it took about 2 minutes to make one ten bar, 25 minutes to make one hundred square, and about 6 hours to make one thousand cube. Since I made 55 ten bars, 10 hundred squares, and 1 thousand cube, all together this took about 12 hours. Really, I worked on this for about 15 minutes a day or so for a couple months.
Difficulty: Fairly easy, but time-consuming. Tying the fishing line was at times a little challenging in poor lighting since it was so thin and hard to see. However, all the steps became fairly mindless after the first few attempts.
Cost: ~$25 (which made 1 thousand cube, 10 hundred squares, 55 ten bars, and 450 leftover single beads.) I already had the wire cutters and pliers, so all I had to buy was fishing line (~$3), wire (~$5) (neither of which I used anywhere close to all of), and beads. I paid about $18 for 3000 beads. The faceted, 8 mm, plastic beads (Affiliate Link) shown in this post were $5.77 for a 1000 pack on Amazon, though the price fluctuates daily. After I purchased my first pack I had to wait a couple weeks for the price to drop before I bought the remaining 2 packs. (I used camelcamelcamel.com to track the price and be notified when my target price of $6 had been reached.) However, I noticed that our local craft store (Michaels) sold similar beads at $4.49 for 500. With a 40% coupon, this would have been an even better deal.

Materials:

• 3000 “golden” beads (or whatever color you choose)
• fishing line (I used 6 lb monofilament fishing line, but any would probably work)
• wire (I used a 175 ft spool of 20 gauge galvanized steel wire from the hardware store, but any similar gauge would likely work. I estimate I used about 85 ft.)

Supplies & Tools:

• small diagonal wire cutters
• needle nose pliers
• ruler
• scissors

Instructions:

To Make Ten Bar
1. You could string the beads first, curl an end, cut, then curl the other end, in order to ensure the wire is the right length. However, I chose to cut the wire first, that way I could do the ten bars in groups of 10, assembly style. First, I cut wire measuring approximately 4″. This was perfect for me based on my 8 mm beads and how I curled the ends, but you’ll want to try it out to find the perfect length for you. Usually I just measured the first one with a ruler, then used that one as a reference to cut a few more.
2. Next I curled one of the ends of wire using the tip of my needle nose pliers.



3. String 10 beads onto the wire.
4. Curl the other end with the needle nose pliers.

To Make Hundred Square

To Make Thousand Cube

With 3000 beads, you will have enough to make 55 ten bars, 10 hundred squares, 1 thousand cube, and still have 450 beads leftover to use as singles (or use Montessori colored beads instead for the single digits). I chose to make a box to hold my Montessori math material.

There are lot of ways to use the “Golden” Beads. You can use the 3-period lesson to introduce the concept of a unit, ten, hundred, and thousand. You can ask your child to bring you a certain number to help with counting. You can also combine the beads with other Montessori math material such as the number symbol cards or Seguin boards.

Click here for more Mathematics activities for kids.

Related Links

Montessori Learning Activities
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