Place Value: Too Much Candy

Really we have been working on place value all year.  We set up our number of day sheet so that Jess hit it daily.

But our firsties did not know that.  And we have not explicitly taught it.  On purpose.  We wanted our firsties to have a strong number sense foundation built up before we expected them to break apart these bigger numbers.

So it was time to get started on explicitly examining the tens and ones of a number.  But how?  We wanted so badly to make it connect to real world.  We needed them to see the importance.  What better way to do that than with...Candy.

Our problem: We didn't know how much candy we had and if it was enough for the whole grade level.

 Our question: How can we count these suckers in the most efficient way?

After some suggestions of counting by ones and twos, it was suggested that we put the suckers in groups of 10.  The lesson began!! 

Each student got their own bag of goodies to count on their own.  Jess and I were able to work one on one with the kids that had some difficulty.

They wrote down their number and they worked together to compare and contrast their numbers.

It was a good start and now we just need to move forward!