Saturday, 16 April 2011 17:45

Tip #31: Rock Your Students' World, Part 3: Place Value Hopscotch

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"Place Value Hopscotch" is the third of my 4-part "Rock Your Students' World" series of instructional videos.  I filmed these short videos with five of my former students recently one day after school.  Each Teaching Tip over this four week period will feature one of the videos.

 

The video series shares its name with a teacher resource book I've written, and my hope is that Rock Your Students’ World will see the light of day in the not-too-distant future.

The book includes over 100 brain-compatible activities and ideas that incorporate movement, music, and storytelling into the classroom.  In this video series the focus is on the first of these components: movement.  

Specifically, the four activities demonstrated in the videos highlight what I call "concept-embedded movement," in which the activity itself features a type of movement that represents, matches, or embodies the meaning of the content students are expected to learn.  Thus, when students move around and participate in the activity, they are actually bringing the content to life.

In this video students learn the names of the place value positions.  In third grade we start with the ones place and progress to the ten thousands place, but this activity can easily be adapted to incorporate more or fewer places, as well as the places to the right of the decimal point.  As students jump into each box of our hopscotch court, they call out the name of that box.  For example, for the first three boxes the students call out “ones,” “tens,” and “hundreds.”  The next box is the double jump for the comma.  The last two boxes are “thousands” and “ten thousands.”  The students repeat the sequence multiple times over a period of days.

Click here to watch video now.

If you have trouble with this link, the video can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADAh77wTGeI

New Teaching Tips appear every Sunday of the school year.

 


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