It was the 100th day of school on Friday! To help celebrate, we did a whole class counting collection. This counting collection was our biggest collection yet! We started out with the large collection all together, and then broke that collection into smaller parts to tackle in groups. When we were all finished counting separately, we had the hard task of adding them all up for a grand total of 2,000!!! We started with groups of 10's, then made those into groups of 100, and then into groups of 1,000! |
What do you do with over 2,000 pom poms?? Each kid gets to make their own 100 pom pom creation :) It was such a fun way to explore numbers and a great way to reinforce the idea of place value with kindergarteners. This was the first time we explicitly talked about the thousands and what that looks like.
Prior to this, we have discussed ones, tens, and hundreds by seeing how groups of ten influence these numbers. With ones, this looks like 1-9 being single digits and 10 being our first 2-digit number that needs a new spot, the tens column. Next comes the hundredths place! When we have 10 groups of ten, we need a new spot for that 3rd number. The pattern continues as such. Kids can get stuck with this idea in many different areas; from knowing what the 1 means in the number 14 to writing a number like 451 and and understanding what that means.
Learning place value in kindergarten through counting is leading kids through a sequence of understanding that leads to multi-digit addition, subtraction, ect.