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Tuesday, February 4, 2014

A Quick Intervention for Place Value

I was working with a class of second graders the other day when I realized that one of them was not making the same connections and showing the same understandings as the other students were.  We were writing equations that totaled 300 and this little girl was really struggling.  I discovered most of her struggles were due to not understanding place value, so as the other students got started on their math stations for the day, I pulled her aside for a quick but effective lesson on place value.

I really think this helped her connect all the pieces!

Here is what we did.  I grabbed a small white board, marker and some base 10 pieces and a numbers to 1000 deck and started by showing her this.

I put out 36 base ten pieces and asked her to write the number.  She wrote 36.  We then talked about what the 3 meant and what the 6 meant.  I then helped her write the number in expanded form.  
We did the same thing with a few other numbers including 200.  What does that 2 mean?  Why do we need to write two zeros?
We then went back to 36 and talked about counting by 100 starting at 36 as being the same thing as adding 100 over and over again.  We wrote the numbers we got as we did this on the board.
First we were adding 100 (counting forward by 100) than subtracting 100 (counting backward by 100).  We discussed patterns we noticed and what was changing in the number each time.  
To finish up, we did a quick activity using a white board and the numbers to 1000 deck.  She flipped the card, recorded the number and then wrote it in expanded notation.  Quick, easy and effective!  Looking for other ways to use these cards?  Check out this post!
I will be using formative assessment to check in with her understanding this week!  I am hoping this mini-lesson helped catch up her understanding about place value!

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