A Great Game To Teach Place Value
Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions and on and on and on. Before any kid can learn basic math skills, they must develop an understanding of place value. l Here’s a great game you can play at home. It is called Number Compare, but I’m sure you can come up with a name that is more fun that that.
1. Remove all of the face cards (jack, queen, king) from a deck of cards. The aces are equivalent to 1. Then divide up the cards into two piles. You take one pile and your kid takes the other.
2. At the beginning of each turn you each flip over at least two cards and put them next to each other. Which number is greater and why? Is the 16 greater than the 26? Why is that? And this is when you can have the discussion about the fact that the 2 is in the ten’s place, making it twenty and the 1 is in the one’s place, making it ten. And 20 is greater than 10. So 16 is less than 26. (If the numbers happened to be equal, then write an = between them.)
3. Have your kid then write down on a piece of paper, 16 < 26 (the open mouth always faces the bigger number).
4. Play this game until you run out of cards. See who had more “greater” numbers.
Try playing it with 3, 4 and five cards (you might need to use two decks of cards.
It’s important to use the words, “greater than”, “less than” and “equal”. If you kid says, “bigger than” or “larger than” when referring to a number, just restate it as “greater than”. “Bigger” or “larger” refer to size, where as “greater than” refers directly the value of the number.
Good luck.
October 24th, 2009
