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:
- Print the Number Symbol Cards document onto card stock.
- 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
Montessori Learning Activities
Math Activities
Best Books for Kindergarten
This is a lovely resource! Thank you for providing it s a freebie! Just FYI, the 1000 cards should be the same green as the units. This reinforces the place value system — the 1000 is the unit of the thousand family, the 1 000 000 is the unit of the million family, etc. So the pattern of green, blue, red repeats infinitely. :)
Thank you for letting me know! That makes a lot of sense.
I am a father from China,I am very excited to find this meaningful resource. Thanks a lot for your work.
Hi, Alex! You’re welcome. :) I’m glad you will be able to use this resource!
Very interesting idea for making learning fun for kids, I am sure kids would love them too. Thanks for sharing these activities!
I’m glad you found them helpful! :)