Place Value Puzzlers: Meaningful Place Value Practice

Place value practice often focuses on questions like, What digit is in the hundreds place? While students certainly need to understand the position of each digit, place value understanding goes much deeper than simply naming a digit or its place. Students need opportunities to reason about the value of digits, read and write large numbers, compare numbers, and think flexibly about how numbers change when quantities are added or subtracted.

Place Value Puzzlers provide that kind of varied practice in a simple game format. Students work with numbers through the hundred thousands, and instead of answering the same type of place value question over and over, they respond to a variety of tasks that encourage them to think about each number in different ways.

How to Play Place Value Puzzlers

The game includes two sets of cards: number cards and puzzle cards. Two to four students can play together, or you can use the cards during small-group instruction.

To begin, turn over one number card for everyone to use. Before doing anything else, have students say the number aloud. Reading large numbers correctly is an important part of understanding our place value system, so I wouldn’t skip this step!

Next, each player draws a different puzzle card and completes the task using the same number. For example, with 275,634, students might be asked to:

• identify the value of the 7
• name the digit in the tens place
• determine whether the number is even or odd
• add 10,000 to the number

Once everyone has completed and discussed their task, turn over a new number card, draw new puzzle cards, and play again.

Go Beyond Naming the Place

What I especially like about this format is that students work with the same number in multiple ways. One student might be thinking about the value of a particular digit while another is considering what happens when 10,000 is added to the number. Rather than treating place value as a collection of vocabulary questions, students begin to see the relationships among the digits and the quantities they represent.

And don’t overlook the opportunities for math talk. Because everyone is working with the same number, students can listen to one another’s tasks, explain how they found their answers, and agree or disagree with each other’s reasoning. During small-group instruction, you can also use the puzzle cards as prompts and dig deeper with questions like, How do you know? or What would change if we added 1,000 instead?

Lots of Place Value Practice, Very Little Prep

Once students know how to play, Place Value Puzzlers can easily move from small-group instruction to a math center for repeated practice. Because the number card changes each round and students draw different puzzle cards, they can play again and again without simply repeating the same problems.

Download the free Place Value Puzzlers here. Print the number cards and puzzle cards, and you’ve got an easy way to get students reading, discussing, and reasoning about numbers through the hundred thousands.