Sweet Tens and Ones

I've been working over the last few weeks on introducing tens and ones to my kiddos.  We work on this a lot through our calendar time (as I'm sure many of you do).  We represent how many days we've been in school with tens and ones each day.  We used to use just base 10 blocks or bean sticks to show tens and ones, but then our district told us that we need to show different ways to show groupings of tens and ones.  We do our calendar on the Smartboard, so we started in August putting a crayon in the ones place each day of school.  When we got to 10, we "put" the crayons in a crayon box and wrote 10 on the front of the box.  For September, we used apples for the ones place and placed 10 apples in a basket with a 10 on it.  For October, it was Halloween candy.  You get the idea. 
   Well, since we are (as I tell my kids all the time) "halfway to second grade", we introduced the children to the base 10 blocks.  In our class, we call the 10's "sticks" and the 1's "squares".  My kids seemed to catch on to this really quickly, so I thought I'd have some fun with them.  For our place value center last week, I used this great activity from Teach With a Smile:


If you've never been to her site, you need to check it out!

The gingerbread theme of this activity gave me an idea.  I found some cute clip art in my Mailbox magazine that was candy sticks and gumdrops.  I copied these, colored them, laminated them and put them in my center for this week.  I wrote 2 digit numbers on index cards and put those in a basket with the candy pieces.  Basically, the kids use candy sticks for tens and the gumdrops for ones to show each number.  Because we are low on  out of funds at our school for supplies, we use a lot of scrap paper.  The kids then grabbed a piece of scrap paper, drew the candies and recorded the number next to their picture. 

I know that it's a little late in the year for gingerbread (I meant to do this activity earlier, but...), so I made a version to go with Valentine's day.  Basically, I used a picture of a Twix bar for the ten "sticks" and some candy hearts for the ones.  Just print out 2 or 3 of each page, laminate, write your numbers on some index cards and let your kids have fun with some sweet place value.
Valentine Place Value