A short instructional video (presenter: Rebecca) demonstrating how to use a Gattegno place-value chart to teach counting in ones, tens, hundreds, reading three- and four-digit numbers, handling tens boundaries and zero as a placeholder, and extending the chart to decimals. Examples used include 11, 567, 889, 4.56 and 2034.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Rebecca. And in this film we're going to look at how we can use the Gattegno chart to build understanding in place value. A Gattegno chart looks like this. It has ones along the bottom, then tens, then hundreds. It can be extended to go up into thousands and tens of thousands and further, or it can go down into decimal numbers. To use a chart, you could start off by beginning with just some simple counting, counting in ones, counting in tens or, or counting in hundreds. Then you can move on to pointing to different parts of the chart and asking pupils to write the number that they have made and to say it. For example, if I point to 10 and 1, pupils would need to say 11. You could move on to three digit numbers. For example, if I point to 560 and 7, they would then need to say the number 567. You could use the chart to explore what happens when you cross a tens boundary. If I point to 800 and then 80 and 9, then children would need to say 889 and you can challenge them to say, well, what would happen? What's the next number in the sequence? What happens if I add one more? Moving on, we can look at this chart which moves into decimals, and we can use this to teach children how to say decimal numbers. I could point to 4, 0.5 and 0.06 and pupils would need to say the number 4.56. If I pointed to the number 2000 and then 30 and then 4, pupils would say the number 2000 and 34. And it's a really good way of exploring what happens when zero is a placeholder in the middle of a number. You can use the chart to explore what happens when you move up the chart and down it. Pupils can see that the number gets 10 times bigger as you go up and 10 times smaller as you go down. You can explore what happens when you move to the left or move to the right of the number. There's lots of different patterns to spot here and each row will have a different pattern on it. So there you go. There's just a few ideas for how you can use this chart to explore place value.
