Montessori Hundred Board Activities: Place Value, Skip Counting and Number Sense

The Montessori Hundred Board is often introduced as a material for helping children sequence and recognise numbers to 100—but it can do so much more.

With a few simple extensions, the Hundred Board can become a powerful hands-on tool for developing number sense, place value, skip counting, mental maths and mathematical reasoning.

Children commonly begin by placing the numbered tiles from 1 to 100 onto the board and using a control chart to check their work. This is valuable practice, but it is only the beginning.

Before looking at extensions check to see the child is reading the number correctly for example that they are not mistaking 28 for 82. Some children get the teen and ty numbers confused.  Another thing to check for is that they are placing numbers on the correct row. If children are working with a peer make sure to take note of which each individual child is doing on the board and whether one child is taking more of a lead than the other, this will let you know if one child is more likely ready to move on than another.

Once children understand the basic layout and are using it with confidence, you can use the Montessori Hundred Board to help them notice how numbers relate to one another. They can explore what happens when they move one space forwards or backwards, jump by tens, find number patterns, count from different starting points and solve simple addition or subtraction problems visually.

These Montessori Hundred Board activities require very little additional preparation, but they encourage children to move beyond memorising the number sequence and begin thinking more deeply about how numbers work.

Montessori Hundred Board Activities to Try

-          Find a tile and give it to the child. Ask them to make one more, one less, ten more and ten less. 

-          Have the child count backwards from a certain number, for example put the 64 on the board and have the child put all the tiles on the board that come before 64. You can make this easier by asking the child to put in all of the numbers that come before 64 but only start with a 6 or have the children put all the numbers on the board that are between 50 and 60

-     Ask the child to put on only certain numbers. For example, give five different numbers. This means the child is not reliant on seeing the number tile before or after to find the correct place for a tile.

-  Give a pattern card such as that below for the child to imitate on the hundred board, this will encourage the child to count forward and back by 1s and 10s.

   - The child could skip count in 2s, 5s or 10s on the hundred board forwards or backwards

-  The child can design their own task cards.