dandelions and dragonflies: "I saw this idea on Pinterest"

How many of you start a lot of your conversations with co-teachers that way? I know we do!

What did we do back in the day before there were blogs or Pinterest?

So...I saw this idea on Pinterest...seriously I did! A few of my teacher friends had pinned it and I couldn't wait to use it. The students LOVED it and were so excited to use them.

Place Value Cups (or renamed by my students...it's a like a Decoder or a Vault Lock)

I gave each student five cups and a blue pen to start with. Depending on grade level, abilitiy, and lesson you can adjust how many cups you give your students. What's awesome about this is that I bought 50 cups for less than a dollar!

You have to discuss/talk with the students as to how all the cups have to stay in the same direction. This was a little hard for me because I am left-handed...but they caught on pretty well.

Because I used these cups with my decimal unit we started with marking a decimal point on one. The remainder of the cups they had to mark with the numbers 0-9 on the rim of the cup. Spacing was a little bit of an issue, but again they caught on (maybe after one or two mess ups).

This is how they were looking as they were writing the numbers:

I also love that because we were using them for decimals including whole numbers and decimals, they could move the cups around to make the number they needed.

So here is how I used them:

I either called out a number or wrote one on the board using word form or fraction form:

This is three and three hundredths