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Activities for teaching place value?


Dahliarw
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My ds is almost 7. He totally gets place value with manipulatives (i.e. thousands, hundreds, tens, ones and exchanging them like 10 ones for a 10 bar, 10 hundreds for a thousands cube, etc). What he is having trouble with is place value when he sees a number on paper. So if he sees 5621 he'll pull out one thousand cube, two hundreds, etc. I've explained working left to right and the largest number is always on the left. Anyone have any ideas for how to help reinforce this for him? An online game would probably be his preference, but I'm up for activities or worksheets or whatever it takes. I think a couple of extra lessons would cement this for him.

 

Thanks!

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Can he read the number aloud? If he sees 5621, does he know how to say it? If yes, then remind him to "listen to himself" when he says the number slowly--he will *hear* that he is saying five thousand, so he should pull out 5 of the thousand cubes, etc.

 

If he can't say the numbers, I would suggest drawing, together, on a big piece of paper, a simplified place value chart. Make it big, colourful, and illustrated. When you draw, start with the ones column. Take a highlighter in a colour of your choice and draw a big column. Get him to notice that you're starting on the right or "far" side of the paper. Illustrate it with a character that you can call Mr. Ones. Leave a spot at the bottom of the column where you can place digits, which can simply be numbers written on squares.

 

Then move on to the tens column. Choose a different highlighter and colour the whole column. Get your son to notice that you are moving across the page in the opposite direction to reading a word. Draw a character, and name it Mrs. Tens.

 

Move on to the hundreds and the thousands this way, naming them perhaps Dr. Hundreds and Sir Thousands. Get your son involved in the illustrating. Then have him place digits into the various columns and tell you how much they are worth. By actively creating the chart with you, and having the added visuals of the colours and characters, he is more likely to remember the order.

 

When he sees a number all by itself, remind him to visualize it fitting into the columns you created.

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Math U See's Decimal Street has been invaluable to us. Both for our child who had to go back and relearn it that way and for our children who began with it.

 

:iagree: I'm not crazy about MUS past the primer, but we've used this and my children learned place value effortlessly. Also, it is really easy to make without have to invest in MUS.

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