Place Value Math and Favorite Math Activities for Ages 4-6

I have a ton of math activities and free resources to share with you in this post! We started working on Place Value when my kids were about 4. We came across some free Montessori materials and used them for years and years. I thought I would spend a little time highlighting these activities again because I know they’ve gotten a lot of hits through the years.  These activities are so easy to incorporate into your math day and really helps kids visualize those higher numbers!

I’ll also highlight some of our other math activities from that time — games, daily calendar, math lapbook, clocks, Montessori math sheets (that are all free here on the blog), etc. Hope you find something useful!!

First, we would sit down together to build numbers.  We built the number out of our plastic number cards. If you scroll down, you’ll see the numbers separate and can stack on top of one another: into 1000, 700, 80 and 3.  [At the time we used Right Start Math with the kids. I liked the quality of their Place Value Cards (not an affiliate link). We used a lot of their other hands-on materials too like the scale and abacus.]

We took out our purple bead sets and counted out the numbers.  I had a brad with 10 hundred bead cards (to make 1000) that I would fan out (though didn’t do that for the picture below).  Then we’d build the number like you see below.

We have some place value materials at this post:

• First Grade Math: Addition/Place Value

Place Value Materials

I also made a Kitty-Hundreds Place Value Cards if that might appeal to your kids:

As I said above, I put a few 1000s together with a brad, just so the kids could “see” how many 1000 dots actually were.

Another activity we did was called the Stamp Activity. It’s similar to the beads, but it uses small pieces of paper with the numbers  1,000   100  10 and 1 on them.

Bottom picture: Place value stamps (I printed them out on different colored paper): You will find them here:

• stamp game

 

When my youngest was ready for these activities we got some place value dice that worked really well.  She rolled the dice and builds the number (saying the full number aloud):

You’ll find similar Place Value Dice here (affiliate link) or at any teacher store.

Pictured below: Place value stamps (printable available here):

 

Feed the Dog: Addition and Subtraction Activity

I was looking for something else on the blog this weekend and came across a couple of math posts that had some wonderful math activities my kids did when they were around 5 or 6 years old.  And not only that, I though I would link to a dozen other math posts we’ve done.  We have a ton of free math materials here at the blog! 🙂

I saw this “Feed the Dog” activity that I did with DD years ago.  Isn’t it cute?!