hi all my dd1 is nearly 6, but cant get her head round tens and units which is making long addition hard! any ideas, i have unifix cubes and a place value chart but she says it does not make any sense! any ideas please mt3 x
My standard answer when they're that young is to just put it aside for a few months. So often it's a developmental thing and you just need to wait a bit.
You could try the Math U See approach to teaching that. Teach her Decimal Street. Draw three houses on a large sheet of paper..one small house (use the color of your ones blocks for this house) one tall house (use the color of your tens blocks for this house) one very large house (use the color of your hundreds blocks for this) then just teach her that each value has it's own "house" reinforce this by asking things like what color are the beds in the ones house? (the answer is the same as the color of the block) then place some ones, tens and hundreds in their houses and ask her to tell you the number....then once she gets that have her turn around and make tornado sounds while you mix them all up and have her put them back where they belong. It's reallly simple and fun and my boys took to it right away.
what we did for place value and long addition is we took single straws for the ones place and then bunches of 10 straws with rubberbands wrapped around them for 10's place. When we get to 100's place i always used toothpicks if needed. Yes, counted out 100 toothpicks and bunched. you could really use anything, but this gave her a visual, it also helped when we were learning to subtract and we had to borrow, that we could borrow from the 10's bunch and the 100's bunch. It really has helped my dd see it and understand the whys. But that said, sometimes my dd has got stuck on things in math and we would either stop and back up if we needed more foundation, or just stop and reintroduce that topic later. Good luck, for some reason, math is always the hardest subject here.
OK, I think I need this as a sticky or something, I tend to repeat it every few months, lol! Take a board and divide it into two. You could even glue a different colored paper to one side. Get some small cups, like soufle cups, and then count EVERY DAY. Count beans, candy hearts (which you can sort by color and graph before counting them!), M&M's, jelly beans, beads, etc. And this is how you count: Put one on the one's (right) side. Touching each side, count "Zero tens and one." Add another. "Zero tens and two." (Again touching each side). When you get to "Zero tens and ten", you "Put them in a cup and scoot them over." Now you can count "One ten and zero. One ten and one. One ten and two." And, again, when you get to "One ten and ten", you once again "Put them in a cup and scoot them over." If you get to "Ten tens", you put all ten cups on a plate and scoot them to the left of your page and count "One hundreds, zero tens and zero." This is very flexible. You can use it to teach other number bases if you wish. ("zero fives and one, zero fives and two,...zero fives and five; put them in a cup and scoot them over! One five and one....) You can count backwards. "Two tens and two, two tens and one, one ten and zero...." Can't take another one away, so take one of those ten cups and empty it, calling it "One ten and ten", then continue with "One ten and nine, one ten and eight...." This is awesome for teaching addition/subtraction! If you're adding 15 plus 6, you've got your one ten and five, and add your six. Count the five and six, and when you get to ten, what do you do? "Put them in a cup and scoot them over!", leaving the one left. And it works with subtraction, too.
thank you thank you all for your replies, i tried some worksheets with her and she seemed to get it a lot better, and will try a few more suggestions tomorrow with her and fingers crossed they sink in thanks again mt3 x
