Making Math Real

So much about third grade math involves building upon what students already know. In the beginning of the year we will extend their understanding of place value by crossing over to the ten thousand and hundred thousand place on a place value chart. Students have had experience working with the tens, hundreds and even thousands place value blocks but ten thousand seems out of reach. To make it more real we build the ten thousand. We take ten of the thousands cubes and duct tape them together. (Told you duct tape was a good thing! (: ) For the hundred thousands we take our ten thousand and place it on the rug and mark it off with yard to build it. What is neat too is for kids to see the pattern of the cube, rod and flat repeating in the thousands period of the chart. Those are some big numbers!