Bird's eye view

So, I've been wanting my youngest to be able to do the bird's eye view or 45 layout of the Montessori golden bead materials for some time.  The Montessori golden bead material includes a golden bead representing one (a unit), a string of ten golden beads representing ten, a square (10 ^2) of one hundred connected beads, and a cube (10^3) of 1000 connected beads.

 The bead material is very expensive, so wooden squares and cubes can be used as well.

The wooden thousand cubes, although a lot less pricey than the beaded thousand cubes, can still be costly ( a value price, when shipping is factored in is about $30 for 9 cubes) and there are not many works for which you will actually need 45 of them.  I didn't feel it was practical to buy three more sets so that I can have 45.

So.....I did what any homeschooling mom would do.  I searched online and found a diy alternative at mummy's homeschool.  Paper cubes!  To print your own,  click here .   I just printed the remaining 27 paper cube pages.  I cut each individual square, laminated, then cut them out again.  Then I taped the pieces together into a cube.                                                   

   The 45 layout helps the child to visualize the quantities of the decimal system from 1 to 9000.  The layout requires that you have at least 45 of each golden unit beads, forty-five tens bead bars,  forty-five hundred squares, and forty-five thousand cubes.  I had all the materials except for the later of which I only had 18 wooden cubes and one golden bead cube.

Taping both sides adds more support to the cube.

one down, twenty-six to go!

Making the 27 cubes took about three days.  Of course this was not a none stop project, this was a do it when I think of it sort of thing.

Like I mentioned in a previous post, my middle child is always in the mix when it comes to Montessori works.  So, she kept a watchful eye on her younger brother as he set up this work and she made sure she was in the final picture!