My little one is home from school for 3 weeks, for winter break, and we are enjoying the extra time together. One of her most requested outings, is to 'visit the craft shop'. And by 'visit' she means buying a whole heap of things to cut, fold, glue and create. I have to admit, I do not protest too much. While we were there last week, I grabbed a few bags of mini popsicle sticks.
I am currently revising and adding additional games to my resource on place value / base ten:
We played a very easy version of 'Race to 100'.
To play this, you need a pile of single sticks, a pile of sticks that have been bundled into 'tens', a standard six-sided die and two empty containers.
I highly recommend getting your students to help you make the bundles of ten. It will assist their understanding of 'tens' and also assist with counting. I had my daughter briskly counting to ten by 2's in no time.
To play, simply take turns to roll the die. Whatever number you roll, you take the corresponding number of singles.
Here, my daughter rolled 5. She collected 5 singles.
Upon her next turn, she rolled 2. She got 2 more singles and quickly determined that she had a total of 7. Here, you can also challenge your students and ask them to identify how many more they will need to make ten.
On her next turn, she got a 6. She gathered the 6 and added them to her stash.
She took 10 out from her stash, and traded them for a ten bundle. Here, I would encourage her to identify her total as 'one ten and three' or '13'. We also talked about how many more she needed to make the next ten. She naturally liked to compare how many more she had to me and how much she was 'beating me by'!
As each ten is collected, it gets deposited in the container. The aim is to get to 100. She spontaneously started counting by tens throughout the game to check and recheck her totals.
We had loads of fun and she has asked to play this game every day since!
I also want her to work on her general understanding of the order of numbers up to 100. She is good at counting, but is challenged by ordering larger numbers and using more advanced strategies for addition.
I created a little '5 in a row' game for us to play, to help her with the general location of numbers on the 100 chart.
Please feel free to have a copy - just click and download it from google drive, by clicking on the image below:
