There’s a new Number Roll Champion at Light of the World Academy, a K-8 Montessori charter school in Pinckney. And this is one of the most impressive academic accomplishments you’ve ever seen from a kindergartner.
Izzy Magri is a 6-year-old kindergartner at the school, and over the past two years, she has written every single number from 1 to 11,111.
Every single number. Izzy wrote out 11,111 separate numbers on sheets of paper, and then she taped them all together.
Izzy obliterated the old school record by more than a thousand, and she was more than willing to keep going, but she figured that 11,111 was a symbolic place to stop.
Being the Number Roll Champion at Light of the World Academy is a big deal – and the honor currently belongs to this tenacious little girl.
“I learn how to get better at writing numbers and it just shocks me that I want to do it!” Izzy said.
“We are so proud of Izzy,” said Light of the World Academy founder and director Kathy Moorehouse, “The number roll is a Montessori-specific work that children choose to do, so she made the decision herself that he wanted to do this. It’s all student-directed. The kids learn number sense, ordering, recognition, place value and number patterns. They also perfect their number writing. This is often where their love of math is sparked.”
When a student chooses to start a number roll, they start with 1 and go as high as they aspire to. There are 10 numbers on each sheet and every time they finish another sheet, they start taping them together. Eventually, they’ll have a “number roll,” and the higher they get, the bigger the number roll gets.
Moorehouse said the number roll also teaches a student about goal-setting and diligence. Students sometimes get creative with the number rolls. One student a few years back, Addy Lovell, wrote all the numbers to 1,000 by Roman numerals.
When Light of the World Academy opened in the 2002-2003 school year, Moorehouse established the “1,000 Club,” honoring each student who wrote all their numbers from 1 to 1,000.
The first two members of the 1,000 Club that first year were kindergartners Madison Ferris and Amelia Moorehouse, both of whom are in their late 20s now and turned out pretty well.
Ferris graduated from Georgetown University and Harvard Law School and is now a corporate attorney in Washington, D.C. Who knew that doing a number roll would get you into Harvard Law?
Moorehouse earned a master’s degree from Michigan State University and is now a Board Certified Behavior Analyst in Kansas City, working with children on the autism spectrum.
Doing their number roll as kindergartners certainly set them up for success!
The first big Number Roll Champion at the school was Asha Narayan, who wrote her numbers all the way from 1 to 6,600 as a 6-year-old kindergartner in 2006. Narayan graduated from Michigan State in 2021 and is now a Senior Analyst for Strategic Development for Adidas, living in Portland, Ore. Again, doing the number roll paid off!
Narayan’s mark of 6,600 stood as the school record for 14 years, until LOTWA student Mason Stchur hit 10,001 in early 2020. Mason is now a sixth-grader at Maltby Middle School in Brighton, and still loves math.
Mason’s record stood for five years, until Izzy hit 11,111 in March of this year. She felt that was a symbolic place to stop, but she doesn’t want to stop doing number rolls, so she’s already started working on a new goal.
“Now she wants to write all the numbers to 2,000, by twos,” Moorehouse said. “So she’ll write 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on, all the way to 2,000. After that, I wouldn’t be surprised if she writes them all the way to 3,000 by threes. She’s a remarkable little girl.”
And as we’ve seen with the past champions, the future obviously looks bright for Izzy Magri.
Here’s Izzy herself talking about her number roll accomplishment:
