Home made Montessori

My little guy has some problems grasping the decimal system, place value and such. We have been using Math U See and I really like it, but despite large amounts of effort and patients it didn't really catch on. So I was being on the look out for something to help us. As some of you know, I am volunteering for the Christian Library here and it is now in the building of Hand in Hand Christian Montessori School. When I came to the library one day, I saw what Montessori kids had worked on that day. In the long hallway they had many, many chains of beads strung out in one long row. Underneath were little arrows with numbers. This got me interested and so I researched more. After quite a while of searching and reading I decided that this would be helpful for us. So I set out to make our own Montessori math materials. I decided that we would start with the golden beads and the exercises that go along with that. We have use the materials now for about two weeks and I think he starts to understand more. It is really hands on and it can almost be experienced, just what we need. Now I am not saying that I do montessori math, I don't know enough about that, I just read from one lesson to the next what I can do to help him understand how units become tens and how tens become hundreds and so forth. In any case he has fun doing it because it is so logical and hands on that understanding comes pretty much effort-less. Here are some pictures of our materials.....

 Due to finances, we had to tweak some things. The "golden beads" are amber colored pony beads, the thousand cube is printed on cardstock. I found two trays for 99 cents at Goodwill. The bottom is cut from a piece of foam, so that the materials won't slide around too much.
The number cards which usually are made from wood, but I have printed at on card stock. The strange looking bead thing is supposed to be a hundred square.

 This one actually doesn't look too bad, it is our hundred chain.

In the basket are ten hundred chains, we have nine thousand cubes, 47 tens (in the red bowl) and 50 or more units in the glass dish.
It was kind of fun making these.