A short instructional video (YouTube) by Rebecca presenting three classroom activities to reinforce primary pupils' understanding of place value: (1) bundling lolly sticks to demonstrate ones, tens, hundreds; (2) a team dice game with a place-value chart to form highest/lowest numbers strategically; and (3) a human place-value chart using digit cards and a tennis ball as a decimal point to introduce decimals and show effects of multiplying/dividing by 10 and 100.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Rebecca and in this film I'm going to look at three simple activities that you can do to reinforce understanding of place value. Now, it's vital that pupils understand the relationship between the columns in the place value chart. One good way to look at this is using lolly sticks. Explain to the children that one lolly stick represents one in value. Then you can ask them to create bundles of 10 lolly sticks, asking them to keep going until they have 100. Then you can question them and say, well, how many ones are there in 10 and how many tens in a hundred? And so on and so on. Another really simple game that I love to play with my class is simply using a place value chart and a dice. Split your class into teams. You could do two teams or you could do it on tables. And it's really simple to resource because all you need is a one to nine dice. And children can make the place value chart themselves using paper or a whiteboard. Challenge your pupils to either create the highest possible number or the lowest and then use the dice to generate a number. Each time, the children must decide where to place it on the board. For example, if I challenge them to create the highest possible number and I rolled a nine, you would hope that pupils would see that the best column to put it in would be to go in here in the hundreds column. Similarly, if I was challenging them to create the smallest possible number, you would hope that they would see that the best place to put the nine this time would be in the ones column. Keep going, generating numbers every time, asking them to strategically place them to meet the challenge. One final activity that I really like to do is to create a human place value chart. So what you can do is have some place value headings around, put on the wall and give children digit cards. Then call out numbers and they need to go and stand in the correct place. This is a great way to introduce decimals. You could have a tennis ball that represent the decimal point and ask a pupil to stand and hold that. This game is particularly effective if you're teaching multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100 because the tennis ball mustn't move and pupils can see what physically happens to the number when you multiply and divide. So there you go. There's three really simple activities that you can do to reinforce place value understanding in your class.
