Becky Inspired {Place Value}

A few years ago I was working with this student, we'll call her Becky. She was starting fourth grade and was barely able to complete second grade tasks and activities without some assistance. I found she had two main areas that needed attention:

*Counting on and skip counting to bridge to multiplication.
*Place value awareness to help transition to regrouping strategies.

"Becky" HATED math- she would just shut down completely at the mention of math. So I had to think outside-of-the-box, and create games or game-like materials for her to use to build her skills in these basic content areas.

Here is a recource I created specifically for "Becky," and have adapted and transformed to use with several students since then.

"Pace Value Sort Cards" is a freebie in my store, click the link and grab your copy!

I use it like a game, with a deck of UNO cards. I had "Becky" randomly draw cards and place them right to left on the sheet. We started with only using the sheet for Ones-Hundreds. After she placed the cards, she recorded the numbers in a Place Value Chart. We would then use notebook paper to write numbers to represent each digit's value. 100 for 1 in the hundreds place, and so-on.

"Becky" also struggled to read numbers greater than 50, so I had her read the numbers, and eventually worked on writing the numbers out in word form. This bridged well for introducing expanded/standard form.

Each time she "got" a number, I'd have her remove a selected card and place a new one in its place. We would then go through these steps and she would decide whether the new number was more/less than the previous. Eventually she would have a list of 5 or so numbers she could put in order from least to greatest or vice versa.

Over a few weeks I began to add the thousands. And eventually we moved into the millions. So this student who could barely read a number larger than 50 at the beginning of fourth grade was: reading, writing, and decomposing numbers up to 100,000,000 by the start of fifth grade.

I added a lot to this product to assist another student I began working with during fourth grade. We will call him "Sean". He had some similar issues as "Becky" had, but came with his own uniquities as well! We'll cover that in a later post. You can read it HERE.