After discovering a tweet from a student in Kristen Wideen’s class telling how the children were representing 2-digit numbers, I shared the idea with the 1st grade team. They were excited to have another way for the children to practice number sense.

After brainstorming with the teachers, we decided to use a combination of manipulatives and apps to represent numbers. The children use concrete manipulatives throughout the year so they had lot of experience working with money and base ten blocks before moving to apps.

Individual White Boards – to draw tally marks of their number.

 
Dice – We first started out with 2 regular dice (1-6). Those students who had chosen a number with digits greater than 6 quickly discovered regular dice didn’t work! This turned into a perfect problem-solving activity. Should we change the number? What else could we do to show our number?

Hundreds Chart – We chose the free, easy-to-use SchoolKit Math app. The hundreds chart is one of 10 activities within this app.

Base Ten Blocks – We used the Number Pieces app. (Thanks to Mrs. Wideen’s class for recommending the free app!) We asked to draw a T-chart and label it with tens and ones.

Money – One of the choices of the SchoolKit Math app is money so this is what we used. The students were asked to represent their numeral using a couple of different money combinations.

Process:

Before starting, we reviewed how to use the camera and tips on taking a clear picture. Then we practiced taking a screen shot. We also talked about cropping images and I was amazed at how quickly the children picked that up!

Next, we went through each method and “built” our numbers.

Finally, we were ready to pull everything together in Pic Collage. The students LOVED building their collage and trying out the wide variety of backgrounds!

Because we ran out of time during our first session, we met later to have the children post their collage to their blog.

The children loved the activity (as did the teachers). Plus, it was a great way to check to see how students were doing with their number sense using 2-digit numbers.

The students at work: