Ones, Tens, and Hundreds - The Story of the Names We Use In Place Value!

This Reader's Theater was written for a small group of 3 students. It is intended to introduce - or review for students who are struggling - place value periods as well as the fact that each period has ones, tens, and hundreds. In the script, The census taker is going from door to door to find out who lives there and finds a neighborhood where EVERYONE looks the same. They all have the same names as well. This makes the census taker freak out and even think about quitting before a little kid named One Million suggests that the census taker start asking for everyone’s last name. The census taker learns that, even though every house has someone named Ones, Tens, and a Hundreds, they all have different last names and that is how we keep them separate.

There is a short writing assignment after the script asking students to write and explain why their teacher assigned them this script. One of my favorite things to do is find a way to tie math into Language Arts. This concept is one students need to be provided with multiple ways to understand it and that is just what this script does! I write small group reader's theaters so they will work better in centers and to avoid having long wait times between student's lines. Wait time is not reading time and often turns into off task behavior time. Small group reader's theater helps to get students reading more and encourages even reluctant readers to practice fluency.

My name is Melanie Whitesides but my store name is Wonbyone and I hope that your students enjoy this script as much as mine did. Most of my scripts are black and white so that they can be photo copied easier and take less ink. Please let me know what you think.

*Also please note that I use this with my 3rd grade class but they do require help with the vocabulary words that I listed.

Ones, Tens, and Hundreds - The Story of the Names We Use In Place Value! by Melanie Whitesides is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.