A Year 3–4 maths instructional video (presenter Zoe) demonstrating place value using the three-digit example 274. The video shows multiple concrete representations—counters, Numicon, Dienes/base-ten blocks, and number lines—emphasising exploration, manipulation (e.g., exchanging tens/ones), estimation, and pupil-led investigation to build confidence.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Zoe and in this video we're going to be looking at place value and representing numbers in different ways. In the year three and four curriculum, pupils are being encouraged to represent numbers in different ways. That's what we're going to explore here. We're going to start with a three digit number. Remember from our previous videos, the digits don't take a numerical value till we have them in their place value. We're going to start with the number 274, or once we place in here, 274. Now we're going to use our counters. We could use counters to start this off. So we could put two counters in our hundreds, we can use our counters to put seven in our tens and then we can use four counters in our ones column. Just a little reminder, it's the ones column, not the units column. Okay. If you're using numicon again, I've arranged these in the shapes of your numicons so that might be useful as well to start pupils off. As well as using our counters, we could then use other counters to add in and explore that place value. We put an extra one here. We can be asking the children, what's that number? Now if we take one away, what's that number? So lots of opportunities for them to investigate. If your school has dean's blocks. Again, another way of representing this number. So we have 200 represented by 100 square there we have seven tens and we have four ones. And the great thing about this is we can manipulate this to write it in a different way or think of it in a different way. So it's 200 plus 6 tens plus 14 ones. This gives people a really good grasp of that place value in order to play around with it. And that's one of the best things for pupils to do, is to play around with this. Represent the numbers in different ways, gives them that confidence. After that we can also go on to thinking about number lines. So here we've got number line from zero to a thousand and get the pupils to say whereabouts do you think 274 would be? Get them to estimate. Placing that on our number line, we could even go between the hundreds. So 200 to 300, getting them to place roughly where they think that number would go. Again, it's about practice, it's about investigation and it's about those pupils getting to grips with that real confidence. And that's how we use our different tools to represent numbers to reinforce place value.
