Who's Who and Who's New: Place Value

Showing posts with label Place Value. Show all posts

Sunday, February 22, 2015

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:

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Place Value Fun

At the beginning of the year I usually start with teaching my students place value. Place value is a concept that show up again and again throughout the year so it is essential that students have a solid understanding of it.

As part of my unit students become very familiar with the hundreds chart. At one of my math centers I have students put together a variety of hundreds chart puzzles.

http://terristeachingtreasures.blogspot.ca/2014/09/hundreds-chart-puzzle-freebie.html

You can get a copy of your very own for free here!!!! I recommend printing each set on a different color piece of card stock so they are easier to gather into sets if they get mixed up.

Cheers,

Monday, June 23, 2014

QR Codes: Black, White and Boring!

I just returned from Galveston, TX where I presented a session on how to incorporate QR codes into learning stations to make them fun and engaging but educational at the same time.

It was evident by the size of the audience in my session and the comments from teachers and administrators that there is still lots of interest in QR codes despite the fact that they have been around for years now. Why? Because although they are common place to me, that is not the case everywhere.

When I first came across QR codes I thought, "Black, white and boring!" Aesthetically there really is not much of a "wow" factor.

It was not until two years ago, when I learned how to link QR codes to audio that I began to get interested in them. Having worked with preschool aged students for many years, my mind raced with possibilities for incorporating them into stations.

Soon I discovered how to link QR codes to images and by then I was hooked on them.

There are two types of people reading this right now, those who have used QR codes with their students and those who have not. Regardless of where you land, I hope to share with you new and creative ways you can utilize QR codes with your students.

The following are FREE QR code activities that span a variety of subjects and grade levels.