Pack As Much As Possible

These students are packing their blocks. We’ll see how this packing will help them discover how many blocks they have.

How many blocks do we have here? To find out, we’ll pack them as much as possible.

We start by getting a holder so that we can put blocks into it.

So far, we have packed 5 blocks.

Now we have packed 10 blocks.

By covering the filled holder with another holder, we create a block-of-10.

After we continue to pack for a while, we have two blocks-of-10 and are in the midst of packing a third block-of-10.

We continue to pack until no more bigger blocks can be created.

Once we are done packing, we know exactly how many ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands we have. Now we can determine our number.

If the blocks are not packed as much as possible, we can’t assign one digit for each size block.

Let’s do another example. This time, let’s take a larger collection of loose blocks and pack them as much as possible.

So far, we have packed several blocks-of-10. There are still more blocks to be packed!

We’re done packing the single blocks into blocks-of-10. But we aren’t finished yet, because the blocks-of-10 can be packed together.

We can pack the blocks-of-10 into a larger holder.

Now we have created a new larger block – a block-of-100.

We are done packing as much as possible.

We can set the digits to find out what number this represents.