A Grain of Rice

Author: Helena Clare Pittman

Publisher/Date: Hastings House, 1986

ISBN: 0-590-93999-8

Grade Levels Recommended for Use: 6-9

Brief Summary: a clever, cheerful, hard working farmer's son wins the hand of a Chinese princess by outwitting her father the Emperor, who treasures his daughter more than all the rice in China.

Topics: place value, face value

Suggested Activities:

Place Value, What's the Highest Number? Use prediction strategies, the students will show the ability to order digits to create the highest or lowest possible number. Materials: Each student needs a copy of a game sheet and writing utensil. Teacher needs to have a copy of the games sheet on the overhead and a number cube. I use a big number cube. Procedure: Each student will have a piece of paper that is divided into columns and rows. The number of columns dictates how far you want the place value lesson to go, five rows goes into the tens of thousands. The number of rows dictates the number of games to be played. The teacher has a student roll the number cube to see which is the first digit that needs to be placed. Once the digit if revealed, the student needs to decide where that digit should be placed. The goal is to create the highest number into the hundreds and the first digit rolled is a one, the student would place it in the ones column. Once all the students have written down where that first digit is located then another student rolls the number cube for the next number, ad so on until all the needed digits have been rolled. When it is completed ask for someone to tell you what the highest possible number could have been, and see how many created that number. It is fun for the students to see if the teacher created the number too! This works well for the lowest possible number also.

Deck of Cards for Place Value: Practice reading numbers up to a million. Materials: old decks of playing cards and remove the 10s, jacks, kings. Save your old decks to have a set of ten. Procedure: Aces are one, queens are zero and all of the others are their face value. You may use these in any math reviews from place value, add, subtract, multiply, divide, rounding, and greater/less than. Draw out as many cards as your grade level requires. Place them face up and read for face value, draw out pairs and add, subtract, multiply! Draw out some and arrange in largest order. Children enjoy this game rather than writing these numbers. They may work in pairs.

Place Value Bingo: Materials: index cards, marker, piece of paper Teacher Preparation: You will need to create the index cards. On the top of the card you will put "ones" and put "1" on it. You will continue this through the number nine. You will then start a set of cards for the "tens" 0-9, and so forth up to a million or whatever has been taught. Procedure: Students take out a piece of paper. They will take a marker and come up with a seven-digit number (if working up to millions) They write this number down on their paper. The teacher will call out a number -- nine in the hundreds place. If the student has a nine in the hundreds place they get to circle the number. The teacher continues calling numbers -- three in the tens place, and so on, until a student has all of them circled. They will then call back and say, I have a two in the ones place, a nine in the hundreds and so forth. Then they have to read the whole number. If they got it, they win. I usually give a small reward and we start a new game, with a new number that they write down.

Fill the Train Place Value: The students will understand HTO (Hundreds, tens, ones). Place value is like a train. All cars hold lone family HTO, and they each have a different last name! Hundreds, Thousands, Millions, etc. Procedure: to begin Fill The Train, place your "comma" students in the front of the room, leaving enough space for three "number" Students to fill in! This is a race so make sure your students have enough room to run to the front! Now, the fun really begins! You say, for example, "I want a five in the one thousands place! The person to stand in the correct spot wins that seat in the car. Continue until all seats are full than have the class read number they have just made! At first you may be doing a lot of redirecting, but soon the students get the hang of it and love to play this game!

Powers of Two: use calculators to compare the linear increase of adding two over and over to the geometric increase of doubling over and over. Sum the powers of two to find out how much total rice was given.