Polonia /
Let's talk about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries [236]
Ok, so here's a bit more information for you.
ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Finland-Education-Report.pdf
'the mathematics content required in lower secondary school (our grades 7-10) is comparable to the average American high school graduate's course of study.'
Grades 7-10 in Finland is fourteen to sixteen years old at which point compulsory education ends and most people choose either upper secondary or vocational school, though vocational school doesn't stop you from applying for university when you finish there.
Let's take a look at the present advanced (as opposed to basic) maths curriculum in Finnish upper secondary school which starts at age 16 and where the changes will be made:
'by completing the advanced syllabus in mathematics, Finnish students have completed math coursework similar to that of a U.S. college math
major.'Now, what you were not aware of, but what I discovered within a few minutes of googling (because being a teacher I know what to search for in this case) is that whilst making those changes at the upper end of the education system, they will be making another radical change at the pre-school level, and not before time. Maths teaching in Finland will now begin from the age of three and the reason for this is that despite the high standards of the secondary advanced maths syllabus, students entering university to take up maths degrees are struggling with certain very basic concepts. This supports what I was explaining to you earlier and what Montessori discovered over a century ago through her observations and work with thousands of children over fifty years, which is that, the basics are most easily acquired before the age of six through concrete learning. I expect to see Finnish pre-schools using, if not Montessori's materials, then their own adaptations of them.
Do you know it's possible to teach the squares and cubes of number with concrete materials? While children at the pre-school age are not able to verbalize these concepts, they can represent them. Through the use of short and long bead chains, number squares and cubes, and numeral arrows, the Montessori Bead Cabinet concretely demonstrates these concepts.
For example the hundred bead chain of ten bars each comprised of ten beads, can be physically folded into a square of 100 beads, thus ten 'squared' is 100.
montessoritraining.blogspot.com/2012/04/bead-cabinet.html
And years later when the child encounters squaring and cubing in the maths curriculum they remember working with the chains and they understand what they're doing when they square or cube a number. That's why research shows that children who attend a proper Montessori pre-school do better at maths in mainstream secondary than children who attended conventional pre-school.
