A thousand in a cube - place value

A Thousand Cubes

A PLACE VALUE STORY

A child found a box. The child thought, "It's perfect because the length of each side of the box is the same as the other." When the child took the box home, grandfather told the child, "This box is a cube."

Grandfather took the child to the playroom. There, grandfather placed the child's toy blocks into the box. He stacked them row by row and layer by layer until the box was full. The child was pleased to see it and tried to pick it up but it was too heavy.

Grandfather asked, "How many blocks are in your cube?" The child reached into the box and took out the blocks and started to count them. There were exactly one thousand blocks.

"How many blocks were in each row?" asked grandfather. The child stacked the blocks into a row inside the cube, then counted them. "Ten!" the child said excitedly.

"Now, how many layers did I end up stacking to make a column?" asked grandfather. The child stacked the blocks on top of each other and worried about the column of blocks falling over. "Wow, my tower is ten blocks high!" The child cried

Grandfather smiled and said, "I stacked ten blocks in each row and there were ten rows in each layer. I then stacked ten layers upon each other. How many blocks are there in all ten layers?" The child struggled and wanted to count all the blocks again but grandfather pointed to his head and said, "Imagine with your mind, the blocks in their rows and columns. You can count them in tens in your mind. You can even count them in hundreds. Ten rows of blocks times 10 columns of blocks equal one hundred blocks."

The child smiled and said, "That means that there are one hundred blocks in each layer, therefore, ten layers of blocks equal one thousand blocks."

Thank you for listening to the story!