Place Value

How do you teach place value?

 Do you give it much thought or is it just part of your textbook curriculum?  I ask because until this year I really didn’t give it much thought either.

Like many I spent part of my summer reading Guided Math  by Laney Sammons and have set some goals (hopefully attainable) for myself this academic year.  One of these goals was to use Math Journals with more forethought and execution. With this goal in mind I took the whole first week of instruction and focused on place value and a review of base 10 with my kids.

We did some hands on work with manipulative, some group work and partner work and some great activities with my favorite place value tool…the Arrow Cards.

 For our Math Journals we worked together with sets of base 10 problems. We cut them out, glued them in and answered our investigation questions using them. It was a great review for all of 3rd grade.

 Next I split the class into small groups and gave them each a mixed set of arrow cards. I made sure not to give them the same exact set.  I asked them to find the largest and smallest value they could find. 

 We then had each group present their largest and smallest number to the rest of the class.  The kids really enjoyed this activity and helped them to understand the vocabulary that we were using as well.

Because Arrow Cards are not readily available for all my kids I created my own set and two fun activities to go with them. 

You can find them here: Arrow Cards & Activities

Let me know how you teach place value. We are off to estimation and rounding and I'll be sharing my lessons next week. =)

Happy Teaching!!

Fantastic Reading Log

I've posted about this reading log before but I just wanted to repeat it. I've received such amazing positive feedback from teachers using this log.

My student's parents really love this log because it allows them to work with their child to practice these  reading strategies.

The 5 weeks worth of logs include the following topics:
Main Idea and Details
Visualizing
Inferencing
Sequencing
Cause and Effect
Making Connections
Vocabulary
Fiction and Non-fiction
Story Map
Grammar
Prediction
Talking back to books

Give them a try...you won't be disappointed!

Click on the link below the picture to be taken to my TpT store to get your set. 

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Reading-Logs-for-Comprehension