Perfect 10 Snake Game

We are doing a lot of snake game for the past few days.  My son is now loving it unlike the first time he encountered it wherein he kept on complaining how tiring it is to count.  This time, he loves transforming his "jungle colorful snake" to "tiger snake".  For those new to Montessori,

Materials we used here are:

• Decanomial beads
• Black and white beads
• A mat
• Melissa and Doug Magnetic Alphabet box

So here Mavi made his own.  I made sure that the beads will make a perfect 10 just to demonstrate that the two numbers when combined will make 10. 

So here, we are replacing the colored beads (beads that makes a 10) to the golden beads.  The picture on the right is for the control of error. I am showing Mavi that the bead combinations form ten.  In this case: 6 (violet) and 4(yellow), 1(red) and 9(dark blue), 2(green) and 8(brown), 5(light blue) and 5(light blue),  and 7(white) and 3(pink) all makes a 10 (golden bead).

         

As I mentioned earlier, we've been doing this multiple times this week.  Here, I focused on two combinations only:  8(brown) and 2(green),  and 7(white) and 3(pink).  Because the snake is composed of repetitive combination of those beads he immediately memorized that those combinations make a 10.  In the middle of the snake, he did not bother counting... he just replaced the designated combination with the golden beads.

       

Same goes when we tried 9 and 1, 4 and 6 and, 5 and 5.  At the end of each activity, I showed him the equations that we can form out of those combination.  But of course, we will explore more of this "addition snake game" as we progress.

      

We are now starting our random snake game, and that's where the black and white beads will be useful.  They are basically used as a placeholder for the remaining beads after you have counted 10 beads (see the picture below). So here, we replace the colored bead into a ten bar (remove the blue and yellow beads) and add the 3 black beads to represent the remaining yellow beads (unaccounted).

 

This is just an overview of how we play the game. There's more into it actually with the snake game and we'll explore it one step at time.  I am not really good with words, so if my post is not enough, and if you need demonstration or an album, there are lots of it in the web.

All in all it was very effective, effective in a way that you will get the child to come sit with you and play and at the same time learning without getting bored.

Now, who says math is boring??  Happy Friday to all!

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