Graphing with Blocks

Infinite Simplicity

I love working with 100% of an element. With the cubes and tablets, using 100% is original to Froebel. It is a design constraint that feels so calming to me. Over time, I've come to see a correlation between Froebel's rule of using all the available parts and the modern Montessori emotional-education tag-line, "including everyone in the community".

This is 100% of the 1" black sticks - just enough to fit in the palm of the hand.

Graphing with Blocks

5/20/2017

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Here's a graph that arose when I decided to stack the Box 7 squares. It was natural to stack them by color, and structurally more sound to put stacks together into cubes. I also decided to organize the colors to match the organization of Box 8S (the smallest sticks came from the factory in two baggies per size: black, white, orange, and yellow together, and purple, blue, green, and red are together.) I had decanted them into their wooden compartments, and didn't think about it further.

For about 35 play sessions, I only thought of those compartments as useful for telling the colors apart. I did all tallying naming individual colors, which made for some long x axis.
Then, it struck me that it's simple and useful to tally using those two color pallets - which I began doing, but only when using Box 8S. After 5 more times playing, I now see that Box 7 can also be studied using the A and B color sets.

It's a good thing I like to learn slowly!

Open-Ended Survey Question:
What are your memories of being taught math?

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21st Century Froebel

Infinite Simplicity

Logical and mathematical thinking developed slowly in the human race. The Conservation Test is an assessment which demonstrates some of the steps children take in moving from perceptual judgement of quantity to mathematical thinking.