Candy Corn Math - place values

This is a great elementary school math game to help kids understand and remember place value!

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Joshua's math workbook has been focusing on place value recently, which really isn't all that exciting to do on paper, so I thought I'd help make things a bit fun. We set up 3 pumpkins to represent ones, tens, and hundreds (the hundreds were the furthest away, and you can add more buckets for practice with higher numbers too).  Then I gave him 10 pieces of candy corn.  He stood on the mat and threw the candy corn into the buckets and then we wrote down how many he had in each bucket.  

The first time he got 2 hundreds, 1 ten and 1 one.  Then I had a turn tossing and he wrote down my score and we saw who had the larger number.  

We did this a few times and then decided to make it a bit trickier.  We each did 3 rounds in a row, and then he added up how hundreds, tens and ones he had combined and added up mine as well to see who the winner was.  

Whoever won got to eat the tossing candy corn.  And yeah, I let him win, because who really wants to eat candy corn that's been handled that much and on the ground that much.  Only kids.  Of course, Maren and Christopher had to also have a turn tossing the candy.  Christopher didn't really get the whole place value thing, but he did a good job counting how many were in each bucket, and that's about all you need for a preschooler.  For Maren I probably should have made each bucket be something like a x4 or x5 so she could practice her multiplication and then have her add all the numbers together, but I didn't.  Maybe next time.  

This works well for older kids too. All you have to do is add thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions, etc . . .

And while we're on the subject of candy corn, I just feel I should mention that the only kind of candy corn that is any good to eat is Brach's candy corn, and if you've never had it and you are basing your poor judgement of candy corn on inferior brands, you shouldn't.  That's all.