Personalized Math & Reading Sessions
K - 3rd Grade
Summer is the perfect time to strengthen your child's scholastic skills through hands-on learning. Using authentic Montessori materials, your child will explore reading and math by seeing, touching, and discovering ideas for themselves. This concrete approach builds real understanding and makes learning enjoyable.
Each lesson is carefully planned to meet your child where they are and build on what they already know. The goal is to provide rich sensory support, not to replace the traditional curriculum.
Together, we'll keep last year's learning fresh, strengthen important foundational skills, and develop new ones - all while building the confidence that comes from real understanding.
Interested in learning more?
Call or text 413-854-7714 to arrange
a time for us to talk.
Addition Strip Board
Great for learning math facts!
Mathematics & Montessori
Montessori uses the "concrete-to-abstract" approach, allowing children to physically feel and see mathematical operations before memorizing them. This self-paced, tactile approach helps prevent math anxiety and creates a deep, conceptual understanding of math from an early age. Instead of memorizing procedures, children use hands-on materials to discover how math works.
The Snake Game
The Montessori Snake Game (usually aged 5+) teaches addition, subtraction, and number combinations of ten using colored bead bars. (+) Children turn a “colored snake” into a “golden snake” by exchanging sets of 10 beads for golden ten-bars, practicing counting and linear addition. (-) The "snake" is made with colored (positive) bead bars and gray (negative) bead bars. While counting and encountering a gray bead bar that number is subtracted from the previous colored bead. The snake begins to shrink!
The Stamp Game
The Montessori Stamp Game is designed to help children (typically ages 5 to 7) bridge their understanding from physical, bead-based math to abstract written equations. It teaches place value (units, tens, hundreds, thousands) and all four arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, including complex regrouping ("carrying" and "borrowing")
The Snake Game
Language
Writing & Reading
One of Dr. Montessori's most important observations was that writing naturally develops before reading because encoding (expressing your own thoughts on paper) is a more natural, organic extension of spoken language than decoding (interpreting someone else's thoughts from a page)
For a child who is just beginning to decode, the priority is many small, successful reading experiences. Rather than rushing into leveled readers or long books, Montessori offers a carefully prepared sequence, from objects, to labels, to phrases, to sentences, to stories, so the child develops accuracy, confidence, fluency, and, most importantly, a love of reading.
The Movable Alphabet
With Montessori each step is concrete, sequential, and based on the child's readiness. Dr. Montessori's language sequence is beautifully designed because it builds reading in the same way a house is built, from the ground up. If a child is struggling, we simply go back to the point where the foundation became shaky and rebuild it. Instead of practicing skills through worksheets or memorization, the child works with hands-on materials that make the invisible parts of language — sounds, patterns, and word structure, visible, and concrete.
We begin by observing where the child’s difficulty lies and then offer precise lessons to wherever the foundation is weak and rebuild from there.: strengthening phonemic awareness, connecting sounds to symbols, building words with the Moveable Alphabet, practicing decoding, and developing fluency and comprehension. The materials allow the child to move, touch, hear, and see language, helping them regain confidence, independence, and the joy of discovering themselves as a reader.
Learning phonograms
In this particular lesson, combining the Movable Alphabet and individual phonograms builds spelling and writing skills before formal reading. It helps learners to decode unfamiliar words, improves spelling accuracy by highlighting logical patterns over rote memorization, and enhances reading fluency and comprehension
Interested in learning more?
Call or text 413-854-7714 to arrange
a time for us to talk.
The "Write it Down" Progression
Combining the Moveable Alphabet with a personal notebook creates a solid transition between composing a word mentally and writing it physically with a pencil.