Shamrock Place Value Manipulatives

Place value is a big deal when it comes to explaining math concepts.  And I especially love to illustrate new concepts with manipulatives.  So why not make some shamrock place value manipulatives, right?

There are so so so many ways to use these.  We have a tendency to pull out manipulatives anytime we start to have trouble with a concept.  Or even just to really cement the idea.

 

Check out the other St. Patricks Day Math Activities Here!

 

I printed out a few sheets so I had about 6 hundreds, 20 tens, and a ton of ones.  I didn’t even cut out all the ones and we had plenty.  I changed the printable so that you can print extra hundreds without having to print more tens and ones.

I also added the number cards from the make 10 game to the printable to make it easy to grab them.

I made a pile of the number cards and we just picked at random to make numbers.  Then we would match the place value manipulatives to the number we produced.

 

Some simple subtraction.  I had them just take away what they needed to.

 

Next we would move to subtraction with rollover.  I had them break up a 100 into 10 tens.  This really helped Baloo when he was practicing mental math.  To see why we had to take away one 100 really helped him.

 

Finally, Baloo and I have been worked on different mental math subtraction strategies.  One was subtracting by 97, 98, or 99.  Basically you add whatever to get to 100 (so 99+1=100.  You’d add a 1) and then take away a 100.  He could do the mental sutraction before, but when we sad down and saw what was actually happening he totally understood what was going on.  So when I switched it up to 358-199 he was able to easily apply the same technique.

 

Go Here to get your Shamrock Place Value Manipulatives