Place Value Activities

For several weeks we have worked on place value.  We did several activities to help us with this concept.  It takes a lot of practice to realize that a 1 in the ones column or the tens column mean different things.  First, we did a button activity.  We had a lot of buttons in a jar.   We estimated how many buttons we thought it was.  The class divided into small groups.  Each group had some buttons in a bowl to count.  Ten buttons went into a paper cup.  If a group had ten paper cups of buttons they were put into a plastic bag.  When the groups finished counting, we counted all the plastic bags (hundreds), paper cups (tens) and left over buttons to get the grand total.  We had over four hundred buttons!!

We also used base ten blocks to work on place value.  We compared the units, rods and flats.  Ask your child how many units make up a rod or how many rods make a flat.