Montessori Math: Division board DIY

Last year I started the process of creating our own Montessori Math pieces.
My husband helped me create some peg board bead boards for Division work, we just hadn't used them yet. Until today.

We are using a blended / modified Montessori room and today for our Problem of the Day I decided this would be a great way to introduce the Division Board.
The Spiral Problem of the Day book is from a Math book set I picked up 2 years ago (I free cycled a school districts stash of "out of date" books for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, sharing most of them, recycling the worn out ones and saving a complete set including supporting materials for myself.)

Using basic Pegboard, I enlarged the wholes so pony beads would fit but not fall through.
For our basic division I have a stack of 4 jars that screw together. Each jar has 100 green, blue, or red beads and 50 black beads.
The black beads act as the Divisor.  The green, blue, and red beads work together act as the Dividend.

To make it easy to see the numbers I had Nathan build his 48 in the lower corner of the board. We had 8 black beads across the top and started to work out the problem exchanging tens for ones whenever we needed to.

Working through the problem from his bean bag spot, my 7 year old is figuring out a story problem in parts.


Once we figured out how 48 muffins divided into the 8 "containers", we could count how many muffins were in just 3 of those containers.

We wrote in our Math journal to show how we worked through the problem, but that will be another day's post.