Craft Sticks Place Value Village

Silas has been using Math Lessons for a Living Education {Book One} this year. It is a fantastic math book that he has been flying through! You may remember the trouble he was having last year with recognizing his numbers 6 to 10. This year, he is having no trouble at all recognizing numbers! When we started the chapter on place value and numbers in the teens, I was a little nervous. However, he knows all of his numbers now, 1 to 20!

Math Lessons for a Living Education has you make a Place Value Village for your child to demonstrate the ones, tens, and hundreds place values. I have never done this before with my older children, but I knew it would help Silas. The book instructs you to use a small, medium and large container for the ones, tens, and hundreds, along with dry beans and zip lock bags to represent the numbers. It also provides templates for the containers, which I printed on colored paper, laminated, cut out and taped to our containers. We are using small, clear plastic containers from Miracle Whip and coffee. We did it this way the first day.

Then, I saw what my friend at a Beauty Full Slow uses to count their school days - craft sticks. Aaah! Why didn't I think of this before? We have bags upon bags of craft sticks, and I knew the multi-colored ones would look so fun and be much easier to work with than the small beans! I "stole" her idea, and bundled a few groups of ten craft sticks with elastic bands, and left 9 craft sticks loose in the ones container.

I would show Silas a flashcard of a number, like 14. He knew there was a "ten" in the tens container, and he would put 4 craft sticks in the ones container. We did this with several numbers, and he enjoyed it! This really helped him to visualize the numbers and will be such a great tool to use when we begin addition with two digit numbers.

How do you teach place value?