Yesterday was such an exciting day. My delivery of Montessori elementary materials arrived, some for school and some for ME. I spent more than two hours looking through the boxes, checking all the materials and making sure everything was complete.

I hadn't actually seen some of these later materials, so I was so excited. Little-N did his bit helping me out. In this picture he is checking the Pythagoras theorem material, I opened the catalogue to the correct page and left him to complete the material making sure all was there. He made another break through with his maths: as he put the pieces, he  looked at the spaces and worked out how many squares there should be for each place. I don't know exactly how he worked it out, but without counting he said 'we need 9 blue squares for here and 8 and 8 is 16 so we need 16 yellow squares!!' He obviously isn't ready for this material yet [only sensorially], so he wont be working with it. 

I ordered a binominal cube, a natural binominal cube, a trinominal cube and a natural trinominal cube. These went straight onto the shelves in the learning area. 
In the morning while Little-N was still in his PJs [he learns a lot first thing in the morning] he got out the binominal cube and did it with ease.

Next he got out the natural binominal cube and tried that. All the cubes are one colour, so it's much harder to do, he did that with ease.

Then he took out the trinominal cube and instead of building a cube, he built a castle. The yellow cubes where the knights!! Then he got up and sat at the other end of the table and started to build the trinominal cube. 
It's been a while since he worked with this so he was a bit rusty. He completed layer one, then did half of layer two and explained that he can see a binominal cube in the trinominal cube.

I didn't ask him to do the natural trinominal cube and he didn't suggest it either. I think he needs a few more goes with the coloured trinominal cube first.

I gave the natural trinominal cube to my 16yr old brother to try and he did it straight away [he's a genius anyways so I was sure he'd do it]. I then gave it to my dad to try and he gave up half way. It's interesting how some adults I meet can do it without a struggle, while others are totally lost. Little-N also took out the 4 bead chain and counted through that and through the 4 squares and cube, but he didn't want to work with the arrows [I'll post more about these later].
While he was doing his activities his Lego men [I mean Lego knights] were working with him too. He seems to want to involve them with everything he does [this has been happening for the past 4 months] Missing companionship??? He took the above picture and told me to include it in this post!