Place Value

How do you teach place value?

 Do you give it much thought or is it just part of your textbook curriculum?  I ask because until this year I really didn’t give it much thought either.

Like many I spent part of my summer reading Guided Math  by Laney Sammons and have set some goals (hopefully attainable) for myself this academic year.  One of these goals was to use Math Journals with more forethought and execution. With this goal in mind I took the whole first week of instruction and focused on place value and a review of base 10 with my kids.

We did some hands on work with manipulative, some group work and partner work and some great activities with my favorite place value tool…the Arrow Cards.

 For our Math Journals we worked together with sets of base 10 problems. We cut them out, glued them in and answered our investigation questions using them. It was a great review for all of 3rd grade.

 Next I split the class into small groups and gave them each a mixed set of arrow cards. I made sure not to give them the same exact set.  I asked them to find the largest and smallest value they could find. 

 We then had each group present their largest and smallest number to the rest of the class.  The kids really enjoyed this activity and helped them to understand the vocabulary that we were using as well.

Because Arrow Cards are not readily available for all my kids I created my own set and two fun activities to go with them. 

You can find them here: Arrow Cards & Activities

Let me know how you teach place value. We are off to estimation and rounding and I'll be sharing my lessons next week. =)

Happy Teaching!!

Couple of Cute things for free!

I have to say I feel incredibly productive today. I re-designed my calendar wall (pictures to come), created a new weekly reading log and created my own version of a mini poster that I saw on Pintrest. Feel free to grab the Reading log for yourself if you are interested.

 Click here for your mini-poster!

Click here for the reading log!

I also took a trip to the school today. WOW! There has been a lot of construction going on this summer.  My classroom along with several others had new hardwood floors put in. And the biggest project is a brand new staircase that was put smack dab in the middle of our entryway. I'm posting pictures of all this tomorrow as well. As you can probably guess the place is a huge mess.  Because of the new floor I had to pack up my entire room and place everything on two palates. I now have to move everything back in. While the task is daunting (to say the least), it does give me an opportunity to make changes and re-decorate. Can't wait to show you all the before and after pictures of that project either.

So in the meantime...here are the resources I created today and feel free to download away. =0)