The Great Unnesting

Learning Activities

Students have been building numbers with materials, drawing numbers with symbols to show their value, and creating diagrams to show the value of different digits.  

When counting place value materials to identify numbers Charlie and Van have been remembering to count the tens in tens and the ones in ones.

By working with place value materials Adam identified that that 26 is two tens and six ones, and it is also 26 ones.

Nimrat was able to show others that 113 is 1 hundred, 1 ten and 3 ones and it is also 11 tens and 3 ones.

Ella found that in some of her place value diagrams she would write a 5 for the tens. Then she figured out she had to write 50 to show 5 tens.

The Great Unnesting Activity

Students were challenged to make a moveNprove based on this example.

Within the student's example, all four answers had to be different and also correct. Only one of the answers could be the traditional nested place value  illustration; the other three answers had to be unnested illustrations of their number. 

William had made his own moveNprove questions before where you have one right answer and three incorrect answers. He found making four correct with different answers more challenging.

Morgan found that if you used too small of a two digit number it was impossible to make four different answers. He worked out that by using a number in the thirties or bigger actually made the activity easier.

Morgan  also came up with an explanation for why we call the different views of place value nested and unnested. “I get why they call it nested and unnested because the nested one is tidy like in the nest, and the other one is untidy like it is out of the nest.”

Brody  made a mistake with one of his unnested pictures because he lost count with the ones symbols. He fixed it by carefully grouping all the one symbols into groups of ten. “I fixed my mistake with a patch”.

Emma-Lee realised that  by making the ten symbols different sizes it made it confusing for others reading her moveNprove. She discovered she needed to make the symbols the same size, or else they wouldn’t look like the same value.

Victoria was also able to explain why it was important to have clear place value symbols in her moveNprove “We had to make sure that our place value symbols were clear and could be easily counted so others could figure out our moveNproves.”