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Notes from the Field

Ditch the Hundreds Chart Diane Richman

Go into any lower elementary school classroom and you are likely to see one of these:

sizes and in tabletop versions with movable pieces. Hundreds charts can be printed quickly on paper and placed into a plastic sleeves so that students can use a dry erase marker on them. This makes them a reusable and inexpensive tool. I am encouraging you to get rid of every hundreds chart you have in your classrooms and your schools. First, let me assure you that I love and have used every activity above. All of my special education students have access to a counting chart and we use them daily. However, I have my students use a 99s chart (see Figure 2) rather than a hundreds chart and there are several reasons why I made the switch. I was bothered that we could not use the hundreds chart for calculations that resulted in an answer of zero. The students wondered, “ Why isn ’ t that number that starts with 3 on the same line with the rest of the numbers that start with 3?” (or what ever digit caught a child ’ s attention). This led me to look for another option. My first stop was a blog entry (Stohr - Hunt, 2013). In the blog I learned about an alternative to the hundreds chart that the author called a 0 - 99 Chart. As I learned more, I be came a passionate advocate for this tool. Let me explain why.

Figure 1: Example of a hundreds chart. Zero is only represented as part of the multiples of 10.

A hundreds chart or a hundreds board, is a ubiqui tous math aid in elementary school. In the lower grades it can be used for rote counting, to see sim ple skip counting patterns like 2s, 5s, and 10s, to demonstrate the pattern of odd and even, and as an addition and subtraction aid. Add a second column on the left with the same ten that is on the right and it can used for rounding. You can color - code it and use it to count coin values when teaching money. In the upper grades it can be used to find the multi ples of any number up to 100 and it can be used to demonstrate prime and composite numbers. Hun dred charts come in large classroom demonstration

Our number system is composed of the digits 0, 1,

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 47, no. 2

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