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1st Grade · Math

Place Value to 100: Counting and Grouping

Free sample questions, a clear explanation, and 5 practice skills with an AI tutor that guides without giving the answer away.

Building Big Numbers with Tens and Ones!

Hello, Math Explorer! Have you ever played with building blocks, like LEGOs? Imagine you have a giant pile of them. Counting them one by one would take forever! What if you first snapped them into towers of 10 blocks each? That would be so much faster!

That's exactly what we do in math with big numbers. We group them into tens and ones. It’s our secret power for understanding numbers all the way to 100!

Meet the Tens and Ones Team

Think of any number, like 34. This number is made of two parts.

The number on the left (the 3) is in the Tens Place. It tells us how many full towers of 10 we have. So, for 34, we have 3 towers of ten.

The number on the right (the 4) is in the Ones Place. It tells us how many extra, single blocks we have left over. For 34, we have 4 single ones.

Let's break down the number 58!

  • How many groups of ten? Look at the first digit: 5 tens!
  • How many leftover ones? Look at the second digit: 8 ones!
  • So, 58 is the same as 5 tens and 8 ones. Awesome!

The Super-Fast Tens Count!

When we count our towers of ten, we are counting by tens! It’s a cool pattern. Watch this:

10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100

Do you see the pattern? The number in the tens place goes up by one each time, and the ones place is always a zero!

Sample questions

1. Look at the picture. How many sticks are there in total if each bundle has 10 sticks? (Imagine a picture showing 2 bundles of 10 sticks each)
10
20
2
12
Answer: 20 — Count by tens for each bundle!
2. Sarah has 4 bundles of pencils. Each bundle has 10 pencils. How many pencils does Sarah have?
14
4
40
10
Answer: 40 — Start at 10 and count by tens for each bundle.
3. You have 60 blocks. If you group them into bundles of 10, how many bundles will you have?
10
60
16
6
Answer: 6 — Count by tens until you reach 60. How many times did you count?

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