Building Numbers

I love the Montessori materials for math.  The wooden number cards feel so good in your hand.  The cubes, squares and beads are infinitely nicer (even the discount versions) than the unit blocks I used in third grade.  However, the activity that follows can still be done without the Montessori material.  Here's a nice tutorial on how to make your own number cards.  You can just use strips of paper, but the numbers do have to line up and be spaced well, as you'll see from the photos.  Instead of beads and the cubes and squares, you can use traditional base ten blocks.

Even though Bear is still working on teens and numbers past twenty, I feel it is important to talk about bigger numbers with her.  This is why we had started the hundred board and why I had already shown her place value using the cube, square, ten, and unit.  This particular day, we worked on building numbers.

First Bear chose one of each number card.

Then we stacked them so she could understand how the number would be written.

Then Bear went to the shelf and brought the correct amount of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones (she changed the tens card partway through because she wanted to make a square out of the tens bars).

She did one more before she'd had enough.