Description

This 90- page guide covers three years of work with place value beginning around second grade depending on the child’s skill level. Place Value is introduced through story in the Waldorf fashion and continued with a variety of hands-on activities using several different manipulatives including the abacus, Cuisenaire rods, gears, “houses,” counting wheel and place value cards. Each activity provides a different experience with both creating place value from a number and creating a number from place value.

In the second year of place value work, Gattegno’s Place Value chart is introduced to expand our understanding with expanded form and addition and subtraction using expanded form. Several activities with Gattegno’s chart are used to chart place value, understand how it works, and use the chart as a manipulative in learning addition and subtraction. Various games are also introduced to practice this understanding.

In the third year of place value, we are looking at magnitudes of ten, expanded form, and multiplication with numbers ending in 0.  This work, along with fractions, sets us up to understand decimals and precents. Larger numbers and their naming system are explored including millions, billions, and trillions.

This guide has storytelling, art, movement, and hands-on activities to better understand concepts of math. ‘Notice and Wonder’ is used to cultivate pattern recognition in our number system and to help understand what our children are learning. Supplies needed are similar to the supplies for my other units. Corrugated cardboard is needed for the making of the gears. The following supplies are from affiliate links. You may also find them at Waldorf shops such as A Child’s Dream and Bella Luna Toys.

• Cuisenaire rods
  • Corrugated cardboard
  • 100-bead abacus
  • Block crayons
  • Colored pencils
  • Stamp pads
  • Counting wheel
  • Sketchpad or notebook (I suggest spiral bound. We use a Stratford’s 9 X 12 sketchbook.