Working with Numbers

Over the past few days we have been learning about and working with numbers greater than 100.  

We began by reading a story called "How Much, How Many, How Far, How Heavy, How Long, How Tall is 1000?".  We then sorted a variety of number cards in our table groups.  Each group got a pile of cards and they had to put them in order from smallest to largest.  Each group did this activity twice with two different sets of numbers.  Once we had all successfully sorted both piles, we discussed how we knew if a number was larger than another number.  Throughout the sorting activity a question had come up about how do we know if the number in the hundred's category are the same.  So we looked at a variety of numbers and discussed how you begin by looking at the number in the hundreds, if those match you look at the number in the tens place, and then the ones place.

We then had a chance to practice building numbers using base ten blocks.

To begin our next class we watched a catchy place value video.  The song can easily get stuck in your head!

We then read a story called "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs" (one of Mrs. Deyoe's favourites!).  We used this story to talk about how we could use base ten blocks to make a house and how this house could represent a number.  So that is what we did next.  Students were given a number that they had to make a house out of using the base ten blocks.  It was a little tricky, but everyone got the hang of it.

Our next job was to choose our own number to represent this way.  Students each selected a number larger than 100 (and less than 1000), and cut out base ten blocks from construction paper to show their number as a house.  They were asked to write the number they had represented on the top.

We then ordered the houses from the smallest number house to the largest number house.  As we were doing this, we noticed that a few house representations did not match the number provided.  So we figured out what we needed to change and ordered them based on the number represented.