3 free Montessori stamp game worksheets
Free printable Montessori stamp game worksheets: count green unit and blue ten stamps, add two groups without exchanging, and read hundreds with red stamps. Place value practice for ages 5 to 7. PDF download.
The stamp game is where Montessori children move from the golden beads to a more abstract material. Instead of a bar of ten beads, a ten is a single small blue tile printed with 10; a unit is a green tile printed with 1; a hundred is a red tile printed with 100. The quantity is no longer visible, only the colour and the number, which is one step closer to written arithmetic. These three worksheets picture the stamps in the standard colours so children can count them, add two groups, and read three-digit numbers.
What Students Will Practice
- Recognising the stamp colours: green 1, blue 10, red 100
- Counting stamps of each kind and writing the number
- Static addition: pushing two groups together and counting units then tens, with no exchanging
- Reading hundreds, tens and units and writing each digit in its colour
- Moving from concrete quantity (beads) to symbolic quantity (stamps)
The stamp game is introduced around age 5½ to 6½ and supports 1.NBT.B.2 (place value of two-digit numbers), 1.NBT.C.4 (add within 100) and 2.NBT.A.1 (hundreds, tens and ones).
Stamp game: hundreds, tens and units
Red, blue and green stamps; write each digit in its colour box. Free printable PDF.
Stamp game: static addition
Add two groups of stamps with no exchanging. Free printable PDF.
Stamp game: count the stamps
Blue ten-stamps and green unit-stamps; count and write the number. Free printable PDF.
How to Use These Worksheets
Print at 100% on A4 or US Letter paper. Green, blue and red pencils match the stamps.
- Sheet one: count the stamps. Tens are on the left, units on the right, as they would be on a place value mat. Count the blue stamps by tens, the green stamps by ones, and write the number. Say “four tens and six units, forty-six”.
- Sheet two: static addition. Two groups of stamps, one above the other. Push them together in your mind: count all the units first, then all the tens, and write the total. The problems are chosen so no column reaches ten, so there is no exchanging yet.
- Sheet three: hundreds. Red stamps are hundreds. Write the count of each colour in the matching coloured box, left to right. Read the whole number out loud at the end.
- Make your own stamps. Small squares of green, blue and red card with 1, 10 and 100 written on them turn any of these sheets into a hands-on activity. Lay the stamps on the golden bead mat from our Montessori worksheets page.
- Connect to beads. If a child is unsure what a blue 10 stamp means, put a golden ten-bar beside it. The stamp is the bar, folded up.
Common Mistakes to Watch For
- Counting all stamps as one: Point to the colour and the number on the stamp. Blue says 10; count it as ten.
- Adding tens before units: Not wrong here, since there is no exchanging, but the habit of units first matters later. Model it.
- Mixing up the colours: Green units, blue tens, red hundreds is the same on every Montessori material. Keep the bead colour and place value charts nearby.
- Leaving a column blank when there are no stamps: No blue stamps means a 0 in the tens box, not an empty box.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Montessori stamp game?
A box of small square tiles, or stamps: green marked 1 for units, blue marked 10 for tens, red marked 100 for hundreds and green marked 1000 for thousands. Children lay out numbers with the stamps and perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by moving them.
What age is the stamp game for?
Around 5½ to 6½ for static work (no exchanging), and through age 7 or 8 for dynamic operations with exchanging. It follows the golden beads.
What does static addition mean?
Addition where no column adds up to ten or more, so nothing has to be exchanged. 23 + 45 is static; 27 + 45 is dynamic because 7 + 5 needs a ten exchanged. These worksheets are all static.
Why are the stamps coloured?
Green, blue and red are the Montessori hierarchy colours for units, tens and hundreds. They are the same on the large number cards and the bead frame, so a child recognises place value by colour across every material.
More Montessori Maths
See the whole sequence on the free Montessori worksheets page. The stamp game follows the golden beads place value worksheets and the teen board worksheets, and pairs with the hundred board worksheets. Children ready for conventional arithmetic can move on to the addition worksheets.
