Counting by 10's

We had lots of fun exploring counting with cubes at school last week.  The learners began building long trains with the cubes.  The students were very curious how long they could make their cube "train". The students were very excited when they discovered the train they created was so very long, and stretched over the entire classroom floor.  We began to wonder, how many cubes are in the train?

As a class we decided to gently take the train apart by 10's.  The learners placed the cube trains on the table.  We counted the trains to ensure they were all 10 cubes long. The learners then counted by 10's till we got to the number 100.  As a class, we then repeated counting by 10's until we got to the number 200.  We continued counting by 10's until we had counted all of the cubes.  Also, separating the 10's pile every time we reached 100 helped us with our counting mystery.

The learners were very excited when they realized the train they created was 441 cubes long !!!  It was a fun and fantastic number adventure.

At home: Ask your child to explain how grouping by 10s helps to count large number of objects.