Place Value According to USN 2nd Graders: a KidPix Project

This is the digital version of a classroom book created by all 72 children in the USN 2nd grade classrooms of Ms. Berry, Ms. Darr, Ms. Gunn, and Ms. Pitt. Inspired by a similar effort last year, we began with the students of Ms. Pitt's class, intending to create a collaborative book that we could print out to share with the Kindergarteners and 1st graders to help them understand the concept of place value. In a whole class discussion we set some rules for creating the books pages.

Our guiding principle was to make each page clearly illustrate the way we portray numbers by building sets of 10 units one at a time and starting another set as each set of 10 fills up.

The students had some great ideas, including limiting the stamp choices to one or two different stamps, depending if your number has even sets of 10 or a "leftover" set with less than 10 units; keeping the original template color (peach) for unused columns, but changing the column color on the columns containing stamps; and stamping the numerals in the corners and the student's name at the top center.

Each student drew a slip of paper with a single number on it, then created a KidPix page illustrating the number according to the agreed-upon rules. Time permitting, she or he drew another number and created another page. This process was repeated (with discussion of the established rules instead of setting new ones) with each of the other three classes.

Like every classroom activity, this one shows us something about every child's learning style and maturity, as well as something about her/his creativeness and mastery of some basic technological skills. We all had fun creating pages, so much so that some extras were created. Although these extras have been included in the printed version of our book, they do not appear on the web page.

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