The key is to not move students too quickly to base ten blocks because it can really undermine the development of unitizing.The act of composing AND decomposing groups of ten is a huge understanding which remains underexplored in many of our primary classrooms.I have to keep reminding myself that students need lots of opportunities to count and produce sets which isn’t always the case.Some food for thought before diving in and test driving… I’ve referred to the cards in presentations but I haven’t shared them in this space…until now.īelow you’ll find a downloadable set of the cards as well as some videos of us playing around in a first-grade classroom. I’ll go ahead and admit that there is a speed element in the videos that makes me a little queasy but with that being said, the student was comfortable so I felt like we were working at the speed of learning.

A few years ago, I was in need of a resource that would help students build fluency beyond 20 so I created some Base Ten Cards.

Phase tens cards