I have had the materials for this activity in the cupboard for a while and I thought I’d introduce them to J to gauge her understanding. She often tells me she loves me 10,894 times around the moon and things like that so it was probably time for an exploration of larger numbers.
First we read through the book ‘Sir Cumference and All the King’s Tens’ by Cindy Neuschwander. This is a fictional story that introduces the concept of grouping by tens to make hundreds and hundreds to make thousands.
Then we got out the base ten blocks and some number cards that I’d printed and laminated. I found some worksheets online from ?? and printed those out. We started off with tens and ones which was too easy so we progressed right up to using the thousands. The worksheets showed the amount of each type of block and J would find the corresponding base ten blocks then the number cards – ones are white, tens are yellow, hundreds are orange, and thousands are red. J was able to make the number by placing the cards on top of each other in the correct order. For example, the number 4682 was made up using the cards 4000, 600, 80, and 2.
The Free Children 