What you need
- About 60 identical small sticks — matchsticks, ice-cream sticks or earbuds
- A handful of rubber bands
- Paper and pencil, for the last step only
How to play
- 1
Spill them out
Tip the sticks onto the floor in a heap. Ask him how many there are. He will start counting one by one — let him, and let it get tedious. That tedium is doing useful work.
- 2
Suggest a better way
Ask if there is a faster way to count them. If nothing comes, offer: what if we made little groups? Groups of ten are easiest. Let him decide to do it rather than instructing him.
- 3
He ties the bundles
He counts ten sticks, wraps a rubber band around them, and puts the bundle aside. He does this — not you. A bundle he tied himself is a ten he believes in; a ten handed to him ready-made is somebody else's claim.
- 4
Count the bundles, not the sticks
When he has four bundles and seven loose, ask again how many. If he counts the bundles as "ten, twenty, thirty, forty… forty-one, forty-two…" he has just used place value. Say so.
- 5
Write it, and point at it
Now write 47. Point at the 7 and ask what it means — seven loose sticks. Point at the 4 and ask the same. The answer you want is "forty", or "four bundles". If he says "four", do not correct him: hand him four sticks and ask whether that is the same as what the 4 is pointing at.
- 6
Untie one, on purpose
Ask him to untie one bundle without changing how many sticks there are altogether. He will end up with three bundles and seventeen loose. Same 47. This is the move that subtraction will need later, met early and with no arithmetic attached.
What your child is learning
Honestly stated — this is what the activity actually builds, not a list of everything it might touch.
- That ten can be one thing and ten things at the same time
- That the first digit of 35 means thirty, not three
- The idea every column sum later depends on
Why this is the whole foundation
Adults find place value obvious, which makes it hard to teach. A child has to accept something genuinely strange: that a bundle is one thing and ten things at once. Everything later — carrying, exchanging, long multiplication, decimals — assumes he has made peace with that.
He cannot get there by being told. He gets there by tying bundles until a bundle stops feeling like ten separate sticks and starts feeling like one object called a ten.
Why he must do the tying
You can buy plastic base-ten blocks where a ten arrives pre-made. They are fine, later. But a bundle the child assembled himself carries information that a manufactured rod does not: he knows it is ten because he counted it, and he knows it can come apart because he tied it.
That reversibility is the point. A ten he can untie is a ten he can exchange.
Do not rush to hundreds
Ten bundles can be tied into a hundred, and the temptation is to get there in the first session. Resist it. Children secure ones long before tens, and tens are the hard part. A wobbly ten with a hundred stacked on top is not progress.
Stay in the tens for several days. Hundreds will take ten minutes once tens are genuinely solid.
If he keeps saying “four”
Pointing at the 4 in 47 and hearing “four” is the most common answer in the world, and it is not stupidity — it is exactly what the symbol looks like. Do not correct it with words. Put four sticks in one hand and four bundles in the other, and ask which one the 4 is talking about.
He will work it out. Discovering it beats being told it, and it sticks.
Published 17 August 2026 · Suitable for Preschooler, Early schooler, Big kid