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            The night of my birthday, Cathy, Jeanette, Catherine, Margaret and I were hanging out in the women’s house, and I mentioned that I was going to visit some Goodwills, looking for board games that I could convert to Montessori math materials.  The material I had in mind is called the Stamp Game (see the picture below), and contains about twenty colored wooden squares each of green units, blue tens, red hundreds and green units of thousands.  This is a crucial material that helps kids grasp place value and work through addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  The kids here don’t have a firm understanding of numbers, and this material could be really helpful in the after-school program Jeanette is doing for them.  I was planning to get scrabble games and paint the pieces the right colors.  Cathy, who’d been cleaning out the storage closet of unwanted stuff, said, “There’s a box of colored wooden shapes here that seems to be some kind of game I’ve never seen before.  I was going to show y’all and then send it to Goodwill.”  We got it out, and found delicately carved little circles, rectangles and sticks, in yellow, blue, green and red, with twenty of each kind.  It’s exactly enough to make two complete Stamp Game sets!  Glory!