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Place Value Charts

Its been a while since I last updated this blog, so I am going to do a bit of an 'idea vomit', as I have been stockpiling ideas and just haven't gotten around to getting them up online lately.

In Math we have been looking at place value a fair bit lately, developing their number knowledge. We have been using a lot of concrete materials- beans, iceblock sticks, unifix cubes, money etc. I am now trying to link the more abstract with the concrete- using place value 'house charts', where the children need to image the materials and quickly tell me how many tens/ones are in a number.

Quite frankly, my slow brain does not generate numbers fast enough. The poor thing finds it hard enough to make my body breathe, talk and eat, without generating random numbers for the children to computate. After a while I realised I was using the same digits over and over, and completely forgetting digits like '7'. Poor 7.

In the interest of using completely random two digit numbers, and saving my brain from a complete meltdown, I decided to use dice to generate my numbers. I roll two dice, one goes in the 'tens' column, the other in the 'ones' column. The children then read the number, and tell me how many 'tens and ones' there are in the number. I just love these large foam dice I bought from a local emporium (6 for $2). Bargain!
Yes, I did realise that these dice only deal with the digits 1-6. So after a while of using the dice, we switched up our equipment to.... playing cards!
I have millions of packets of playing cards in the classroom, they are handy for lots of things (these ones were 50cents a packet at the same emporium.. double bargain!). In this instance, I have removed the tens and picture cards, leaving the single digit cards behind. If you wanted, you could use permanent marker to create your own 'zero' cards too.

The children loved the rapid fire 'game' of name the number, and my brain loved me too. Triple bargain!

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