Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Dreambox question

Anyone else's kid have particular trouble with the "packing boxes" game intended to teach place value? DD6 mostly gets place value, but is totally thrown by questions like:

There are 52 items. Fill in the missing values.

Boxes.......Loose Items
3.............22
__............42
2.............__

Anyone else got stuck here? Ideas on how to explain it?

(I have a suspicion DD is stuck because it's a complicated way to represent something simple. Like, if you're grouping tens, why did you stick some of them over on the "boxes" side and some of them in the tens place on the "loose items" side?)

I remember DS doing that (he is 7) and he seemed to understand it, and I'm glad because I was scratching my head. It didn't make sense to me until I looked carefully at the visuals and watched how things were moving around. Try that and then maybe you can show him what's going on with the pictures. I don't remember the exact type of question that you posted. I think he was doing subtraction. There have been a few Dreambox levels that I thought were really dumb, or not helping, so I whizzed through and did them myself. So that might be an option if it's really not making sense. Just wait til you get to long division and there's a mine cart racing around taking things away. That threw me for a loop as well until I looked at it closely.

Thanks, blackcat. I do get what they're doing, and I think DD does too (you can suck ten items at a time over to the "boxes" side, or back to the "loose items" side) -- they are clearly trying to get kids to understand that one thing in the tens place (boxes) is the same as ten loose items. But asking the particular question they're asking just seems a bizarre way to try to acheive that goal.

I sat her down last night and walked her through a few examples on paper, and she looked at me like "yeah, duh" and I said that that's ALL that Dreambox game is trying to get her to do, and she was like, "OH."

I also like your strategy of doing it myself if I deem it unhelpful. I'll keep that in my back pocket.

I think it must be setting them up for addition and subtraction when they carry/borrow, so for example you can borrow a box and it turns into loose items. That is what I remember DS doing (sorry to tell you that I think you'll have to endure the "packing boxes" for a while longer, just in different formats).

It gets worse because they have to fill in values for carrying/borrowing in a bizarre sort of fashion and it actually makes more sense just doing it on paper. I could never figure out what they were trying to get him to do and left him to his own devices. I'm glad he seems to be done with it.

That one seemed self explanatory for both my boys - they both got stuck on the "standard subtraction algorithm" - I think this is what BlackCat is referring to in the post before mine. I was not able to figure it out to help Aiden, but when Nathan got there he figured it out with only 1 mistake and so passed the pre test meaning he didn't have to do heaps of examples.

I was so glad - cause it made no sense at all to me until Nathan pointed out you must leave the box empty if you are not changing the figure but for the total you must type the zero if that is the first of the 3 digit number.