Nifty Math Manipulatives

So, I planned on doing my math blog yesterday, but a nasty migraine thought otherwise :/.  I've never had them before until recently.  They are not fun!

Anyway, last year, my team and I went to a math conference with Jenni Winters who is "THE" math common core representative here in Illinois.  It actually was very beneficial and it allowed my team and I to get a much better understanding of where common care is headed.  Jenni gave us a lot of resources and this was one of them.

Since I teach a primary grade, understanding place value is HUGE!  And even that is an understatement! For manipulatives, I usually use base 10 blocks, which I think is pretty standard.  However, I didn't find that it suited everyone and sometimes students were ready to move on from these into something that was a little less obvious.  I started with these....

These are basic 1 inch foam square blocks.  I was fortunate that we had a ton donated to our school and I didn't have to buy any new ones or use the ones that I already had that I do use for other things. 

I separated each tile color and wrote 1 on all of the yellow, 10 on all of the green and 100 on all of the blue.  

These then can be used to build numbers and can be expanded out to show expanded form.  So here the number above would be 426 and in expanded form, it is 400 + 20 + 6.  This is just another way to represent place value rather than using base 10 blocks.  

I put them in containers that would be easy to store and easy for students to use when they need manipulatives.

I will also be making tiles with 1,000 since I will have students who will be ready to work with     numbers that high.  

Jenni Winters showed this using bingo chips or poker chips since they stack nicely.  I felt that anything that I could color coordinate and stack, would work nicely,  You can find chips already labeled with 1s, 10s, and 100s at most teaching stores like Lakeshore and School Specialty.