Through investigations, games, and several lessons based on childrens’ books, students explore the base ten system through the ten thousands, moving from using concrete manipulatives to working with more abstract numeric representations. Using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, students apply their knowledge of place value to solve a variety of problems.

2 Responses to “Lessons for Extending Place Value, Grade 3 (Teaching Arithmetic)”

1. Rosskel says:

   March 27, 2009 at 12:00 am

   Bought this book hoping to find great ideas and …. well a fresh approach to place value. This book is not the greatest one on the market.

   A bit disappointed when I received and read it!
2. Marie E. Durkee says:

   June 27, 2007 at 12:00 am

   This fantastic book taught me exactly how to build student understanding in place value, something I never felt my students fully grasped before. They always seemed to understand fine at the time, but a few months later they didn’t see a problem when their answer to 19+14 came out to be 113.

   The book includes many hands-on activities that build a SOLID foundation in place value that really stays with the students and supports them in all their computation and problem-solving experiences, not just for one stand-alone unit. I always knew I should use base ten blocks to help my students understand our number system, but didn’t realize until I read this book that there were so many FUN activities to do with them! In addition to sequential “building-blocks” lessons meant for the beginning of the school year, this book also includes some lessons to use later in the year, particularly during units on multiplication and division. The lessons in this book do a great job building mental math skills for all 4 basic operations (including 2-digit and 3-digit numbers), and in the process many common student errors with the traditional pencil-and-paper computation methods are eliminated. (However, the authors explain how to support students in their efforts to make sense of the pencil-and-paper methods too). The authors include several literature-based lessons, such as adding the items in the book “1001 Things to Spot” and figuring how many items we have left to spot before the book ends.

   The book is very user-friendly in that a basic step-by-step lesson plan is given for each lesson, and then readers are given a peek into how that exact lesson went in one of the author’s classrooms, including word-for-word accounts of student responses, teacher responses to student misconceptions, teacher modeling, and so on. Extension ideas are included for students who need enrichment, as well as how to help struggling students, and frequently-asked questions are addressed at the end of each lesson. There are also periodic assessments in the back that ask students to show their thinking with drawings, numbers, and words, as well as sample student responses and the authors’ notes on the student understanding or misconception represented in each sample. Instead of dreading that place value unit I knew I needed to teach each fall, it’s now one of my favorite units of the whole year, all because of the ideas and support contained in this wonderful resource!