100 Board

The Hundred Board:

Ages ago they didn't have nifty numbered tiles to go along with the Hundred Boards and I made my own.  They have survived, literally, almost 2 decades with only a few replacement tiles.  I had a bucket of 1 inch plastic tiles and sorted out sets by color.  I wrote the numbers on the tiles with a permanent marker in the following manner up to 100:

Yellows:  each tile has a number on it from 1-100 by ones
Blues: each tile has a number counting by 2's
Greens:  each tile has a number counting by 5's
Red:  each tile has a number counting by 10's

Here are pictures of the tackle box where I keep them with the blank side of a Hundred Board.  I had the ones in sets of ten so the child could just do one group at a time instead of digging through 100 tiles to find a number!  This is done on the printed side first until the child is ready to do the blank side and check their work with a printed one (I had 2 boards, one to work and one for control):

This shows how we use translucent tiles (or even round chips) for skip counting (which leads to multiplication memorization also).  In the photo the child was counting by 3's.

Now there are some really nice sets on the market.  You can see one here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Here is a Montessori Style Hundred Board. [Continued below]

If you need some free printables try these links:
http://math.about.com/od/countin1/ss/100s-chart.htm

Click on Numbers and Operations:
http://www.fuelthebrain.com/Printable/

This is a cool way to use it to count money:
http://mathwire.blogspot.com/2010/09/using-hundred-board-to-count-money.html

My youngest has outgrown the numbered tiles so I'm actually getting rid of them (sniff, sniff!) but she's still using the translucent tiles to skip count since she's at the point in multiplication of memorization.

What's Cookin'? 

Chicken:  I was flustered at the store today about the high cost of organic chicken [Seriously? $9/pound??].  I ended up buying a 1/2 chicken for $2.49/lb - It totalled just under $6 for the store organic chicken.  I got 2 meals out of it (chicken burritos tonight and 10 taquitos with chicken and rice inside for either lunches or another dinner).  After all was said and done and I totalled the cost for the chicken, 2 packs of organic/sprouted tortillas (one corn, one wheat), some sour cream, bit of organic store-brand salsa, a tad of shredded cheddar (that I found in the freezer), and lettuce from our garden... dinner only cost $6 for a family of five.  Not bad!!  Especially considering that it was organic chicken and organic/sprouted tortillas.  Oops, add in an extra $2.50 for the organic tortilla chips they gobbled up before/during/after dinner.

Dehydrator:  We did a 2 day drying marathon.  I dehydrated apple slices, bananas, soaked/cooked oatmeal for cold breakfast cereal, and soaked grape nuts for cold breakfast cereal.

A MUST-SEE video:  This is a great 18 minute video about health and our food supply.  Please take time to watch even a little bit of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rixyrCNVVGA