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Understanding Place Value
Blog Post One by: Michele Jarosch
Having students understanding place value early on in
elementary school is essential. It is a primary concept students need to know
and teachers work hard with students, yet place value, as numerous studies have
shown, is elusive and a hard concept for students to grasp. Just like students
who make connections between sets, envisioning the set, matching that to a
number and than being able to write that number, and understanding they all
mean the same thing.
Place values take time to learn. In the article Understanding
Place Value the authors introduced students to other place value systems.
What is a better way to learn our own place value systems, than through
learning and understanding other cultural place value systems.
Students are allowed to use manipulatives to understand and
learn place value as well. Here are a few YouTube examples of using base 10
blocks to understand place value.
My first experience with another form of place value wasn’t
until last fall in my grad Math Methods course, maybe having learned these
earlier on I may have been a better Math student. Being able to incorporate
this idea of introducing other place value systems may really help students to
understand our own place value systems.
Incorporating these other place value systems not only helps
students with the Math of place values and the knowing for standardized
testing. Integrating the Math aspect of place value systems along with the
History of the system, time and people, Geography of where developed and what
the land was like, Culture of who these people were and what they did, Music of
the time frame, Art of the time period, and more all in to a unit.
Incorporating all of these together you are not only teaching some lesson on
place value, you are allowing students to discover place value and build upon
that knowledge, actively ingrain the information.
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