Place Value Boot Camp Fun

Hey everyone! I am so excited to come to you and tell you about the fun I had in my classroom introducing Place Value to my firsties. Let's just say there was a lot of laughs, yelling, and whistle blowing. 

Let me tell you how I came up with this plan for the day. Like any reasonable person, I went to pinterest and typed in Place Value. LOL! There is a lot of ideas for stations but nothing seem to jump out to me. I decided to type in place value into google and found some blogs that really got the Boot Camp idea going. 

Now when I say I read blogs, I mean I read blog after blog after blog. One website that got em excited was from Teacher Tipster. If you have not seen his videos then you really should check him out. He is so funny!!!! 

He had a video about Place Value and I loved it! Watch the video below.

Did you watch it? Wasn't he funny and great! I made a poster with the song on it and used that day. 

My student teacher Brittany and I getting ready for the day.

Now I started reading some blogs about place value as well. One of the first blogs was Thank God It's First Grade.  Susan discussed doing a Bootcamp. I thought that was a cute idea. She had a Freebie and I jumped on it and grabbed it. Just click HERE to get it for yourself.

The next blog that I read was from The Brown Bag Teacher. She had lots of station ideas. She had created a log sheet that would work for her students. I printed that but realized there was some letters missing so I recreated a similar one and you can click HERE to grab that freebie.

So the day started like normal except for me yelling and blowing a whistle like a crazy person. LOL! The kids came in the room and I started yelling "MOVE IT! MOVE IT! YOU PRIVATES ARE MOVING TO SLOW!" Now as you can image the giggles that were happening at this point. I moved quickly to one of my students and yelled, "What are you laughing at son? Do you need to drop and give me ten?" Let me just say as a teacher, I had to really control my own laughter because this student's face was so funny. He looked at me like "OH, crap she is mad and I don't know what to do." He just shook his head no.

I began discussing the objective for the unit and how we would be learning place value. I told them that numbers have a home and in those homes are rooms. Each room can only hold so many family members. We chanted and did some whole brain teaching modeling. They really started getting into the boot camp.

Next, I started by discussing the song and the names for the Talls and Smalls. We repeated over and over what they were valued in numbers.

I brought some students up to the front of the room and we made our talls and smalls. We discussed the value and practiced counting. If someone counted wrong (kept counting by 10) then we would stop and do push ups.

We repeated this process several times. Then I put a Tens, Ones, and Expanded for chart up on the board. The students REALLY liked this because I let them use dry erase markers on the tables.

I used the SPLAT board to pick our numbers. We would write each digit in its correct place value and then they would write the expanded form. Some children would build their number on ten frames.

There were moments I felt like Ron Clark. I was climbing on chairs to jazz them up. (I hope to go to RCA someday.)

The students had a lot of fun learning about place value. We will spend the rest of the unit reviewing everything we have learned thus far and adding to our learning. I am currently working on stations to add to the math stations they are working on. I will keep you posted as to how they are doing.

I would love to hear what you do to teach Place Value to your students. This is a skill we can all learn from each other.

Thanks for stopping by and for the support. Be on the look out for a giveaway I will be having on FB and IG.