We've been working on place value around here this month, and it's been a lot of fun too. The kids caught on quite quickly, as normal, and we've been playing games to enforce what they've learned. One of our favorite games is
The Place Value Game. Today, though, I taught the boys how to play Place Value War, which they found, "Totally smashing!" You'll need a deck of math cards, which are quite simple to make. Uno cards are AWESOME for turning into math decks. I'm not keen on ruining the Uno set, but they're especially awesome for Place Value War. To play you'll need to either take 4 sets of 0-9 cards out of your Uno set OR take Aces - Jacks out of a deck of cards.
(Aces represent 1, Jacks 0) I prefer the Uno cards because the kids can visualize each number as they'd see it written. To play you'll need to shuffle the cards up and then divide them into two even piles, put one face down in front of each player. You can have your players sit across from each other or next to each other, it depends on your preference and perhaps how good your group is at reading higher numbers. My fellows did fine sitting across from each other. Decide how high you want the place value to go. We've practiced a LOT with Thousands, so in the pictures provided you'll see we only played with tens & ones today. To play with Hundreds, Tens, & Ones follow these instructions but draw three cards, four if you choose to add Thousands in. Just remember to have fun!
Once you've got the cards all set up, and you've decided what place value you're covering each player flips over one card. That goes into the highest value slot, for this example that's the ten's slot. It's not a race and it doesn't matter if people flip them the fastest or at the same time.
Flip over a second card each, this goes into the ones place (or next place value slot.) Each person reads out their number and then they determine who's number is highest. That person earns all the cards of that round. The game continues until one person has all the cards.
In the event of a "War" (we played a whole game without one, much to their disappointment!) you do as you would normally for war by placing three cards EACH face down, and then you draw two more; one for the tens and another for the ones slot (or as many as you need to fill your place values.) Then, you can choose to have the highest number overall win all the cards OR you can choose to have them add the two numbers together. Providing paper and pencil or a calculator for them to do the sums on is a wise choice. If you're gang enjoys this as much as mine, they'll complain when you tell them to put it away!
