Place Value - What is it all about?

Welcome back to term 2!

My students have gotten straight back into learning all they can about mathematics. 

Today Group 1 and 2 started to look at Place Value. Place Value can be one of the trickier areas for children to understand so we started right at the beginning. I gave each group a task - to estimate the number of ice block sticks in the big pile in front of them. After they had all estimated we discussed which way would be the best and fastest way to count. Some said in two's or fives while others said ten. So they were then asked to bundle each stick in to groups of ten and tie it with a rubber band. This is developing the concept of trading. Children need to understand that when we have ten ones we need to change them into 1 ten (a bundle or group) and ten bundles of ten makes one hundred. Once we had created all our bundles of ten (and/or hundreds) we were able to count together in tens and work out who's estimation was closest to the number of sticks that were in the original pile.

After that we used the sticks and bundles (ones/tens) to form an equation. It was the student's job to work out how many were all together by separating the ones and tens when adding. The year 5's were also using hundreds. See below :)