Place Value Practice

Each student will need a hundred number chart (I used the back of their Saxon Math Office), one small pom pom, a variety of brightly colored 10 inch by 1 inch strips of paper, brightly colored 1 inch by 1 inch squares of paper, 1 large piece of construction paper, glue stick, scissors, 1 crayon. You will need to measure the strips and squares ahead of time, but the students can cut them out. The students will toss the pom pom onto the number chart. They will then illustrate the number the pom pom lands on using the 10 x 1 inch strips to represent the tens and the 1 x 1 inch squares to represent the ones. They will continue to do this until their contruction paper poster is full. I wish I would've taken pictures of them tossing their pom poms. That was their favorite part. This idea came from a mailbox book called Independent Practice. If you don't have it, you should look into getting it. Great ideas!

Another idea from the same book that was a great hands-on lesson consisted of using unifix or linking cubes. Ahead of time you will need to put different amounts of cubes (broken apart) into ziplock bags labeled with letters. Put students in groups of 2 or 3 and place the bags around the room. The students will rotate around the room from bag to bag. Their job is to make as many tens as they can and then record tens, ones, and then finally, the total number of cubes in the bag. Before leaving that bag, they must take the tens back apart so that the next group has to do the same. After each group had visited each bag, we went over the correct answers for each bag. They were so excited to see if they got them correct.