Over the past couple weeks, 1st graders have been working hard on studying place value. By definition, place value is the value of a digit depending on its position in the number, such as ones, tens, hundreds, or thousands. “What does that mean?” you ask! When looking at a number, such as 526, first graders are able to break this number down based on what the digit in each place means. First graders would look at the number 526 and know that this number is made up of 5 groups of 100, 2 groups of 10, and 6 groups of 1. We have been exploring and learning about numbers up to the thousands place.
Having an understanding and background knowledge in place value is very important. We will revisit and use our place value knowledge when we learn about multi-digit addition (258 + 23) and subtraction (539 – 93). We also use this information to help us with reading numbers.
Students are engaging in a variety of activities requiring them to build and break down numbers, including using base-ten blocks, representing numbers with place value charts, expanded form and written form! On Wednesday and Thursday, students created a donut craft with hundreds, tens and ones as the sprinkles! Then, they used the number represented in their sprinkles to write out the whole number, the value of the hundreds, tens and ones places, expanded form and written form.
Next week, we will look at the thousands place and more! These first graders are about to become experts at reading and breaking down BIG numbers!
