Math Boards are one of my favorite things about Waldorf homeschooling. Even our neighborhood kids like to play with it. One day we want to make a giant 100 peg one! A girl can dream 🙂

The math board is used by skip counting with the yarn form peg to peg. As you go around the board lovely geometric shapes appear!

The kids loved getting to measure and hammer.

To make a board, you need:

• A piece of wood, pencil
• 10 nails
• Hammer
• String
• Something to trace a circle or draw a circle with.

The type of wood and size of circle is very forgiving.

Draw a circle in the center of the wood. Then divide the circle into 10 even sections marking each with a pencil dot. Hammer a nail into each dot deep enough to make it stay, but not so far that it breaks through to the other side. Number the nails 0 to 9 around the circle. Now tie a string to the “0” nail, be sure the string is long enough to wrap around the circle a few times.

Once the board is complete, use the string to skip count around the board. It works like magic, each time you make a new cycle just increase the numbers by ten. So the first time around is 1, 2, 3 etc… the second time is 11, 12, 13… the third time is 21, 22, 23… and so on. In this way you can count quite high in the multiplication tables under 10. The five tables always makes my daughter laugh.

Thank you for viewing our project. If you make one, I’d love to see it and hear about your experience.