Place Value: Regrouping

We are deep into the world of place value. I'm so excited to teach this standard because I think it is going to help finally solidify a lot of my student's number sense. Here is a quick look at how our "regrouping" lesson went today. I started off by showing students this anchor chart on the carpet. We talked about how "regroup" means to take ten ones and trade them in for 1 ten. The hardest part of regrouping for my students is understanding what to do if there are ones left over. They tend to want to trade all their ones in for a ten, even if they have more then ten.

So we played this little game from Debbie Diller's book. I like introducing the idea of regrouping with unifix cubes because you can model how to take ones and actually build them into a ten. During math work stations today I taught students how to played "First to 100". There are some basic management strategies that are important to model before releasing this game into independent math work stations.

• It helps if you teach the students to roll the dice into  a container to keep it in control. 
• Also, I noticed today that my students had a hard time picking up the number of ones associated with the number that they rolled. (It didn't even cross my mind that this would be tough. It seemed easy enough!) I modeled how to help other members of the group make sure that they are picking up the right number of ones. 
• Then comes the hard part of knowing when to regroup the ones into a ten. (The point of this game is to get 100 cubes.) After each person's turn I asked them if they could regroup yet? How many do you need to regroup? How many are in a group of 10? Can you make a group of 10 yet? What does it mean to regroup? Believe it or not I got a lot of blank stares to these questions. We will continue to practice!

My students didn't want to leave the table. Looks like this math station will be a hit!

This student is counting his tens and ones and deciding if he can regroup yet.

This student just rolled the dice and picked up his tenth cube, so now he can regroup into a ten.