Place Value for Kids

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO LEARN

THE PLACE VALUE

The Place value in mathematics is the basis for doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Place value shows the size of numbers and kids need to have an idea of which numbers are bigger or smaller compared to each other.

That 35 is actually bigger than 28.

Understanding the size of numbers is important.

HOW TO LEARN THE PLACE VALUE WITH THE NEWMERO BRICKS

Spread out the bricks on the table with the numbers facing up.

You could, for example, ask your child to build the number “35”. Your child now has to find the green 30-brick and the yellow 5-brick. Then stack the bricks on top of each other, the largest (green) at the bottom. The bricks are designed in a way, that can stack the bricks on top of each other via the “connector knob”.

Your child can literally see and feel that 30 has 3 tens and 5 ones. Simple stack and unstack the bricks.

All children love to search and build the right numbers.

During this exercise, your child will have to “decode” that the value 35 is a 30 and a 5, then find the right green brick and the right yellow brick. The addition will happen implicitly by stacking the bricks. The number 35 is now physical, rather than an abstract text on a piece of paper. Your child can see and touch the two bricks, splitting and rebuilding the number.

Over time, you can introduce more green bricks (Tens), blue bricks (Hundreds) and the orange bricks (Thousands).

You can, for example, ask your child to build the number 3562.

MANY OUTCOMES

Another fun exercise is to train the place value with ones, tens and hundreds.

For example, create different numbers with the digit 1, 2 and 4.

Your child has to create different combinations like 124, 241, 412, 214 and so on.

These numbers all have the same 3 digit number but have very different values.

You can try yourself with the newmero bricks the different possibilities.

Your child will develop a good understanding of how decimal numbers are build and structure.

We have a bunch of math games to play and learn other things like Friends of 10, Addition, Patterns etc…

You can buy a set of the newmero bricks here.

Have fun!

Christine at newmero