NK 1 -4  |  Teacher Resource Sheets

Ask students to find a number they see on a bus, a billboard, on TV etc, and bring it to school.

Get them to explain the meaning of each digit and make the number using place value equipment or play money.

You could make one of these concertinas with a piece of A4 paper cut lengthwise in three strips, glued together and folded concertina style. The laminated digit cards stick on with Blu-Tack so they can be changed.

The concertina can be opened to show the number of hundreds / tens in a four digit number. It is a good way for students to practise once they understand the concept of nested place value.

This example shows 257 tens or 25 hundreds. You could discuss with students the reason why there are 257 tens and why the 3 ones are not included. Students need to understand why the digits to the right are not considered rather than just learning to “drop them off”. A lack of this understanding could cause confusion when using other strategies.

Instead of the concertina idea above, you could use cups instead. Because the nested numbers are not quite so obvious you could use this to generate random numbers for students to work with by rotating the cups.

Use wooden spatulas (or iceblock sticks) with different values in nested or non-standard written form marked on them, e.g. 100 tens + 3 ones; 12 hundreds + 6 tens; 8 ones + 4 tens + 3 hundreds. Students take 5 sticks from the pile and then race to order them smallest to largest. This is more challenging than it seems.