Digi-Blocks Decimal Blocks

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Allow students to naturally extend whole number concepts into decimals. The decimal blocks kit includes 100 tenths blocks and 100 hundredths blocks. These blocks are made to scale, but do not pack into the ones block. About Digi-Blocks Digi-Blocks are a fantastic resource for helping children to understand conceptually and not merely procedurally how our place value system works. Young students build understanding of the unitizing of ones into countable groups of ten. Unlike other materials, the ones can still be seen and manipulated to help those students who don't 'trust the count'; they can see the ones they have already counted within the blocks of ten and one hundred. For older students, the proportional growth of the packs of ten, hundred, and thousand lead to conversations about the ongoing relative proportion of how physically large quantities are as they get ten times larger; it is consistently a surprise to them how much space one million would take up as they are led to visualize how large ten thousand would be, how large one hundred thousand would be, and low large one million would be. In this way, the students conceptually understand that even though we only add one digit to the number, we are making the quantity so much larger. In a similar way, the decimal fractions set allows older students to actually see how much smaller one-tenth and one one-hundredth is. The number line tray also allows teachers to make connections to the number line - both powerful visual-spatial models. For learning resource teachers working with older struggling students, using Digi-Blocks provides opportunities to experience sense-making with the very concepts students struggle with most: place value, multiplication, and decimal fractions. Having a set of Digi-Blocks should be a required manipulative for every school. -Glynnis Fleming K-8 Mathematics Instructional Coach for Area 3 District School Board of Niagara Show more