We are back again with another quick, easy and practical place value activity with our Expanded Form Train.
What is expanded form
When you ask a student to write a number in expanded form, they have to rewrite the number in a way that breaks up its value. They must show how much each digit actually represents.
In many place value activities, students are building numbers. With expanded form, we are seeing how well they can break them up and reinforce their understanding of how the numbers are partitioned.
Not anymore with our place value activities!
We know our learners need lots of experience with and exposure to the concept of place value, seeing numbers in parts to make the whole, and using it as an addition and subtraction strategy.
Hopefully our printable teaching resources are giving you a variety of engaging, quick and useful repetition for your little people! Let's take a look at one of our activities that will help break down expanded form for our learners, conceptually - Expanded Form Train.
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
Repetition is key in math, especially with developmental concepts like place value, but we can often feel stuck presenting it in the same way repeatedly, doing the same thing over and over again.Not anymore with our place value activities!
We know our learners need lots of experience with and exposure to the concept of place value, seeing numbers in parts to make the whole, and using it as an addition and subtraction strategy.
Hopefully our printable teaching resources are giving you a variety of engaging, quick and useful repetition for your little people! Let's take a look at one of our activities that will help break down expanded form for our learners, conceptually - Expanded Form Train.
Quick Class Warm Up for Expanded Form
Before students use this math center have a whole group activity where you ask 3 students to be a train at the front of the class. Give each of them a dry-erase board and marker. Have the first student (the engine) write any 2 digit number and hold it at his/her chest. The other two students quickly look at the number and write their corresponding value on their boards to match - the second writing the tens value and the third student writing the ones value. The rest of the class check to see if they are correct. Toot-toot! They can take a little drive around an imaginary track to celebrate before choosing 3 new friends to have a turn.
How to Use the Expanded Form Train Pack
After you have pre cut and laminated the train cards, students:- choose a train card, read the number on the train,
- write with their dry-erase markers the expanded form, eg. 11 = 10 and 1 more, in the carriages
- choose a new card and continue
Extend Learning - Calculate and Record
You can further this task by having your students write down their answers on the worksheet included in the Expanded Form Train pack.
You can hop over and find this printable math activity in our TpT store HERE
We also have it in a 3 digit version as well.
We’d love to hear how you are using our math games and centers in your classrooms - drop a comment on the posts, or tag us in your social media posts.
We hope you are having a wonderful week with your little lovelies!
