Reinforcing Place Value Understanding with Young Mathematicians

Hi, this is Brandi from The Research Based Classroom and I'm excited to join the lineup of bloggers here at Who's Who. This past week we did a little bit of a scoot, with a little bit of sugar, to create a fun practice for helping to solidify our understanding of place value. I just call it Skittle Math. Since I'm teaching first grade right now, the numbers aren't very high and that keeps the sugar levels a bit lower too. You could easily do this with any small candy. I chose Skittles, because they don't even tempt me. Had this been M-n-M's I would have been in trouble!

You will need paper plates or paper towels, popsicle sticks, a bag of candy and a container of frosting.

Give each student a portion cup of candy. Don't count - just pour the candy in. It's better if you get a variety of numbers so try to make some less full and others more full. The students used a popsicle stick to spread the frosting onto another popsicle stick in order to "glue" their bundles of ten together. Yes, it would be less messy to have students use squeezable frosting, but I wanted everyone to be able to do this at the same time and I didn't want to buy multiple containers of frosting. So I just put frosting into bowls for groups of students to use and they spread it with a popsicle stick.

Each group of ten candies must be bundled onto a popsicle stick to make a stick of ten.

This student has 1 ten and 9 ones.

After everyone had their Skittles organized into tens and ones, we scooted around to practice counting, sketching and recording the number of candies that our classmates had.

Click on the picture to grab a copy of my student record sheet.

This is a pretty easy practice that my students thought was a blast. Plus I love that they get to move around while they are practicing counting and sketching double digit numbers. And for the fast finishers, I had them flip their paper over and just keep going until everyone finished their work. Thanks for stopping by to read this post. You can also find me at: