Hands-on Place Value Activities!

This past school year was my first one teaching first grade, and with that came a whole new set of standards that I had never taught before, including place value in math! In my district, they dive right in to place value in the first part of the school year; and it was so difficult for my new first graders to understand all of the concepts. It was so important for me to give them hands-on, meaningful activities to work with learning all of the basics of place value and I want to share a few of them with you today!

One of the first things I wanted my students to understand was the meaning of tens and ones. They could tell me the name of a number, but did they really understand how it was made? 

One easy strategy I implemented during calendar time was asking them what we needed to make a certain number. I'd ask them, "How do we make the number 23?" And they'd answer "2 groups of 10 and 3 ones left over. It was important to get them to use the math vocabulary when describing the number. That helped them begin to understand what each place represented in the number.

Then, we set about building numbers with hands-on manipulatives. Here's the beauty of place value - you do not have to have place value blocks to teach kids how to build numbers! When I first got to my new classroom, I had no math manipulatives - zero! The previous teacher in my room had taken them all when she moved to a new school. So, until I could get some official math resources of my own, I had to use a few unconventional hands-on resources. Trust me, your students won't mind! In fact, they love when they get to use something new in the classroom!

To help my students understand the difference between tens and ones, I had them start by just creating separate groups of ten. I put two giant whiteboards on the rug and wrote the number 10 on them to let the kids know that only 10 was allowed to go on the board - no more, no less! 

I wanted something big enough to see on the large boards, so enter unconventional manipulative #1: pointers! I gave 20 pointers to various students and we sorted them by tens. Once we were done, we skip counted by 10 to see how many we had and then practiced writing the numbers we created.

Another unconventional place value manipulative we used often was beans (bought a bag for less than a dollar at the grocery store!). I gave each table group a bucket of beans and a stack of Dixie cups. They had to create groups of tens by filling each cup with 10 beans until they were completely gone from the bucket. Then we counted to see how many groups of ten we had! They were amazed at how many cups they were able to fill to make ten.

Another unconventional place value manipulative we loved to use was unifix cubes! To continue practice making groups of ten, I gave each student a pile of cubes and they used their desks as a whiteboard to count and circle each group of ten they had.

Once my students had a stronger grasp on tens, we moved to ones and began building whole double digit numbers in various hands-on ways.

Once my students were able to work more independently on these concepts, I started putting some of these activities into independent or small group math stations. One of our favorite activities was using card games and place value mats!

Students use these build-a-number mats by choosing a number card, placing it on the mat, and building the number with tens and ones.

With these printable mats, students identify how many groups of ten or how many ones are in a given number.

My students became much more confident in their skills... it was so exciting for me as a teacher! Then we built upon our skills with comparing numbers using greater than, less than, or equal to.

Later on in the year, we paired up our knowledge of place value with addition and subtraction. We started by learning how to identify ten more and ten less than a given number, which I blogged about here! My students loved filling out these tens ladders with giant whiteboards.

And we used these write-on/wipe-off mats in math stations.

With these addition and subtraction mats, students choose two number cards, place them on the mat, and then build and write the number sentence to solve the answer.

Most of these activities can be found in my Place Value Activity Mats pack on TPT! Just click the picture below to go to the product. Both full color and black and white versions are included for each activity mat!

Teaching the Teen Numbers!

We are officially all in on working with the teen numbers in kindergarten. My students are absolutely loving all of the activities we've been doing. They've actually picked up on these number concepts pretty well and I could not be more proud!

We've been going through numbers 11-19, one number a day, for the past couple of weeks. We got into a groove with our numbers routine so that now, the kids know exactly what they need to do.

First, to introduce the numbers, we watched this great video from Harry Kindergarten on YouTube. Not familiar with his videos? You should be!!! He has created such amazing videos and songs for practically every kindergarten learning concept you can think of. First up... Numbers in the Teens (They Start With a 1!):

We used this one to remind ourselves how to write our teen numbers. It reminds them, "Numbers in the teens, they start with a 1!" We also love his Numbers in the Teens Have a Group of 10! song:

The first time we watched the group of 10 song, I wanted my kids to have a deeper understanding of how the numbers are made. We talk about numbers as much as we can during our daily routines such as calendar time. I'll often say teen numbers as "One group of ten, and ___ left over." For a little hands on practice with these place value concepts, I pulled up the Houghton Mifflin website eduplace.com where they have some great online math resources. To get to the teaching tools, click on Mathematics - HM Math 2007 - Grade (K-6) - Teaching Tools - E-Manipulatives. (Apologies if the names are different depending on what state you live in!) I used the digital connecting cubes math mats to model while the students had their own real cubes and whiteboards to follow along. First, the students drew a big circle on their whiteboards and put ten cubes inside.

Then, to make the number, I'd ask them, "How do you make the number 12?" And we'd say "One group of ten, and two left over. Then they put the "2 left over" outside of the circle to show both parts of the number. We used mini-whiteboards to then actually practice writing the number we made.

Here's another example of using the digital manipulatives where we made the number 19:

We did this activity for 3 days, doing 3 teen numbers a day. Then we'd launch into our number of the day. Every day we completed these FANTASTIC number booklets from Growing Kinders' Fun With Numbers Part 2 pack. She has a book for numbers 11-20, and my kids love them! They've gotten so much better at number identification, writing tally marks, representing numbers, etc. as a result of Kathleen's unit. So if you ever read this.... thank you Kathleen! My students adore your activities. :)

We've also done a ton of practice with tens frames, which give the students a great visual of how numbers are made. I picked up this awesome giant magnetic ten frame set from Lakeshore and I love that I can easily leave it up on the board every day.

We also made use of these great double ten frame mats from the blog Primarily Speaking (seriously... she has 4 different 10 frame mats for free... and they are great!) My kids used different kinds of manipulatives to practice making different teen numbers. Their counting has improved so much, especially on those tricky 11-13 teen numbers. They always seem to have the most trouble with these 3 numbers year after year because they don't actually say the single-digit number in the number name like the others do. Does that even make sense? Oh well, it did in my mind... ha!

We will finally get to the number 20 tomorrow. The kids can't even wait. They were practically giddy with delight that we were going to get to... TWO GROUPS OF TEN! Ha! We are having a blast in math! What ways have you found success with teaching the teen numbers to your kiddos?