Visualizing Place Value

This is a fun little place value game that I adapted from one of Peggy Kaye’s place value games in the book Games for Math. It is super quick to pull together and provides a very nice visual and tactile way to experience place value and the “carrying” of numbers.

Each player gets a board (I used card stock for durability), and each board is divided into three colours. In those three sections draw nine circles from top to bottom and label the sections from left to right hundreds, tens and ones. Each person also gets three little pots of counters, anything will do. We had many different colours of the florist gemstone pebbles, so that’s what we used. In the wise words of my daughter, gemstones make everything more fun! When creating my board I matched the colours I chose to the gemstones we had available to add another visual to the process.

To start the game, one player rolls a die and adds that many gemstones to the ones column. As the ones column fills up, eventually you will need to “bump” or “trade in” all those ones into a tens gemstone and carry on with any remaining in the ones column. Go slowly at first! Once everyone becomes proficient, you use two dice.

In the picture above, my daughter had nine gemstones in the ones column already when she rolled her two dice and got four (that is when this pictures was taken). She chose four ones gemstones and traded in her group of ten for a red gemstone, and then added the final three stones to her ones column. Her board then had three ones and three tens, 33.

The game ends when one person gets to 100, or closest to which ever number you choose. Sometimes when we just wanted a quick game I would choose a number between 1-100 and the person closest to the number won. So if I chose the number 43 and I got to 47 with one of my rolls, I would stop. My daughter could keep going until she got a closer number (over or under) or went over my number. She would have to make the call when to stop or take one more roll, kind of like playing Black Jack.

It is a fun way to play with place value! Let me know if you try out the game yourself.

Until next time,
Marina