Hands-On Place Value

I like to start the year off with hands-on place value activities, because place value is the foundation for number sense. My students usually come to me with a pretty good foundation, but I still like to focus on it for a bit to ensure their understanding for more challenging concepts.

Hands-On Place Value Activities

In one activity, students use base-ten blocks to find three different ways to build a thousand. They used a combination of ones, tens, and hundreds to do this, and it helped my students to see how ones, tens, and hundreds relate to each other. They first used the base-ten blocks to create the number, and then they recorded how they made the number on a recording sheet.

Place value is a really foundational math skill in 3rd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade. However, it's always good to review place value concepts at the beginning of the new school year or for test prep before state testing. I'm sharing some fun hands-on place value activities in this blog post, so click through to read my tips for upper elementary math teachers!

In a different hands-on place value activity, students used base-ten blocks to build a place value tower. The tower had to be free standing, and students had to use exactly 50 base-ten blocks for the tower. After they built it, they used their understanding of place value to determine the total value of their tower. They had to count all of the ones and find the value of the ones. Then, they had to record how many ones they used and the value of the ones on their recording sheet and did the same for the tens, hundreds, and thousands. This was such a huge hit with my students! They had so much fun with this activity, and I feel that they were actually learning!

Another activity for that unit was for students to create a number line that showed how to round to the nearest hundred. I believe that students need to understand the concept of rounding through practice on number lines and hundreds charts. I think that the visual gives students a much better understanding of WHY a number rounds to a particular place.

We also played a game using two dice that had the digits one through nine on them. (I like those dice a lot better than the regular dice.) In this game, students rolled two dice and created the largest number possible with the digits they rolled, and then they rounded the number to the nearest ten. To add a little conceptual math, students also had to find the number on a hundreds chart to help them determine where to round the number.

My students loved learned about place value and didn’t want our math time to end!

You can click here for a FREE copy of the place value booklet! I’ve created booklets for EVERY math standard and placed those booklets in a bundle, which you can view here. You can find even more hands-on place value lessons here!