For an elementary open house, how do teachers go beyond worksheets to show parents the learning process that takes place with students in math?

Helena Flats School has a method.

The school uses the Montessori approach in teaching mixed-age classrooms for kindergarten through fourth grade. The Montessori philosophy gets students to use their senses and environment to learn in a hands-on way.

During a Feb. 4 open house, families were able to see the Montessori method in action, which proved to be very visual in showing parents how their children learned math concepts in the classroom.

In the different classrooms, stations were set up where students worked through math problems using color-coded tiles, beads and blocks to demonstrate place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division while visitors watched.

“It’s a great opportunity for people to watch what their children do at school because it is so different in the way that we were taught because it’s manipulative-based; it’s individualized; the child is working at their own level, so within my first-graders I have multiple levels of work,” said first/second grade teacher Kami Doty. “We’re all working to be learners.”

In Doty’s classroom, students demonstrated addition. Parents Tom and Lindsay Greenstone watched their daughter Avery, 6, place colored wooden tiles imprinted with numbers to correspond with colored columns of 10, 100 and 1,000.

It’s called the “stamp game” and different grade levels were using it to teach different concepts.

“It’s so neat to see them work,” Tom Greenstone said to Doty.

Doty replied, “Isn’t it wonderful to watch them?”

Nearby, two students arranged beads and blocks with a corresponding number of dots.

“I have them all set up doing the same number problems. We’re building to numeracy,” Doty said.

While Avery Greenstone arranged the tiles, Doty explained, “A one and a one mean the same thing unless the one is in the tens place, now it’s worth ten — it’s no longer one, so it’s really building on the base 10 system to develop that place value understanding.”

To get to this level of understanding takes time to build, like the blocks that five-year-old Anastasia Keesee arranged to demonstrate beginning math concepts.

Lining up brown wooden blocks of varying width, Anastasia Keesee built a staircase. Picking up a marble, she dropped it at the highest part, watching it ping down each successive step. This game “refines discrimination of dimension,” according to a white placard. The game lets her use touch and sight to discern variations in the blocks such as size and weight.

Anastasia Keesee’s parents, Robert and Laura, said they recently moved to the Helena Flats area ago so their daughter could attend a Montessori program.

“It’s more individualized to the kid,” Laura Keesee said. “We heard the pros and cons of Montessori and what we’ve heard made us think we really want to do this,” Laura Keesee said.

As students learn concrete concepts with the familiar manipulatives, they eventually progress to the more abstract such as worksheets, according to third/fourth-grade teachers Julie Fiske and Cheryl Barber.

This is evident in the way the students demonstrate division. At the concrete level, one student uses a divisor board of nine rows and columns. She divvies up unit beads on the board to show a fair exchange between divisor and dividend. Another student solves a similar problem but on a worksheet.

“We start with the concrete and then we go to more abstract,” Fiske said. “He’s doing the same thing, only he’s doing it on paper, so it’s another level of abstraction and from there he goes to straight division.”

Fiske added, “It’s beautiful how it all works.”

Hilary Matheson is a reporter for The Daily Inter Lake. She may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.