homemade math manipulatives?

[okiemama]

Hello my dd is almost ten I pulled her out of ps a few months ago without having bought a curriculum orvand materials so I went and bought some work books to tide us over until I could figure out her learning style. Anyway I bought the Singapore math 70 word problems every kid should know and as far as I've seen we need to rewind and get a better multiplication foundation befor we move on. I'm wanting to use some manipulatives can you give me ideas on things to use? Right now I'm having her use an ice cube tray and pony beads she takes a stack of flash cards and lets say the card reads 5x8 she woukd use 5 cube holes and put 8 beads in each hole its supposed to drive home the message that MOST multiplication is just multiple additions any other ideas? Thanks mamas!

[2queens&1princenmyhouse]

I've used a game called circles and stars. You just have a piece of paper and the first number of the problem tells how many circles to draw and the second number is the stars you draw in each circle.

With DD2, she understands the concept of multiplication, but doesn't have fast recall yet. I'm having her do a lot of skip counting. We started with the easy 2s, 5s, and 10s, but now she's working on the more difficult numbers. I am of the philosophy that the more kids work with these facts in real situations, they will pick up the recall of the facts. I would rather see her use her fingers to count 4, 8, 12, 16 than 1,2,3,4 that's 1, 5,6,7,8 that's 2.

[2queens&1princenmyhouse]

Using decks of cards can be helpful too.