What Hug's been working on

Okay, I'm putting a Montessori tag on this post but let me start by saying (for anyone who might read this & not know) that this is certainly not traditional Montessori! But, I am incorporating Montessori principles & it's quite an interesting take if I do say so myself :)

I had asked Hug to count something the other day using these flat glass beads we are using as counters. When he had all of the counters out (it was about 28 I think) I showed him that if we started grouping the piles into 10's we would find it very easy to count them... 2 piles of 10 with 8 remaining. I got out the Tens Board (which matches our homemade Teens board) to show him how this would be written. Well, he started grouping them into these 10's triangles.  

I was kinda excited & he wanted to make patterns with his 10's triangles & then we would work out how many counters he had used by counting the triangles. This was a bit of a breakthrough because he wasn't very taken by the lego Ten Bars we made even though he loves lego!

In this photo he had decided that he wanted to create a *huge* triangle. He happened to be only 4 rows along when he asked me how many glass beads were out already & my first response was that it was too many to count - before I realised that there were actually 10's triangles hiding in there & we got out some wool to thread between each one so that they could be counted.

Here, I used blue wool to show where we reached 10 triangles (making 100) &  that were then left with one 10's triangle and 8 units remaining. Totaling 118. I think I need to make up the Hundreds & Thousands cards now.

I'd love to know what any trained Montessori teachers would make of this but we had lots of fun & certainly went further into Hug's understanding of Maths in a very hands-on way so it felt like a very successful morning.