Place Value

These Cool Place Value Math Games are awesome fun for kids to learn math. Our math games make partitioning numbers, tens and ones and all things Place Value a Breeze!

Teaching Place Value can be stressful and is up there with multiplication and division when it comes to the top 10 HATED topics in teaching Math for many teachers.

There’s so much for kids to learn in place value. But the essence of teaching place value is that numbers can be partitioned (broken) into manageable pieces to make them easier to manipulate. 

There’s standard place value partitioning e.g. 329 = 300 + 20 + 9 and non-standard place value partitions e.g. 117 = 60 + 50 + 7. When using non-standard partitions it’s important to remember that the aim of the split is to make it easier to work with the numbers. 

Place value is one of those concepts that is covered across the majority of year levels. It includes whole and decimal numbers. In this post, we are sharing our activities for whole numbers up to 100.

Related Post: Place Value Classroom Basics

Teaching Place Value

Teaching place value requires kids to understand a number of key things:

•  All numbers can be made with the same 10 digits.
• The order of the digit makes a difference so even though the digits are the same 28 is not the same as 82
• The position or place of a digit in a number tells us a quantity. It has a value and this tells us what each number is worth. e.g. 222 the value of each number changes from 2 hundreds, 2 tens or 2 ones depending on where it is in the number 222. 
• Zero is used as a placeholder. It tells us there’s nothing in that place. It cannot be left empty 208 cannot be written 2 8
• Numbers in each place increase by the power of 10 right to left.
• Numbers can be renamed using hundreds, tens and ones etc.
• Partitioning numbers using place value makes it easier to work with numbers, especially mental maths.

These key understandings need to be applied to 2,3,4 and 5-digit whole numbers as well as decimal numbers. In this post we are going to share with you some cool activities for 2-digit partitioning & place value.