Digi-Blocks are a teacher-tested, hands-on way to teach math, from Pre-K to Gr. 5+, for deep understanding. Based on an elegant nested design, all of the blocks pack into each other, only holding 10 blocks at a time and the "smart box" only closes when there are 10 blocks inside. This self-correcting feature eliminates the need to recount or trade. Not only can Digi-Block instill a profound understanding of number sense, it does it fast, elegantly modeling all four arithmetic operations through a place value-first approach.
Digi-Block is the only manipulative that grows with your students. Each increasingly sophisticated mathematical topic is elegantly modeled by Digi-Block's nested blocks. As your students move on to new concepts they always see the link to past topics.
Digi-Block in K-2 Classrooms
More about Digi-Blocks
Digi-Blocks are a fantastic resource for helping children to understand conceptually, and not merely procedurally, how our place value system works. Young students build understanding of the unitizing of ones into countable groups of ten. Unlike other materials, the ones can still be seen and manipulated to help those students who don't 'trust the count'; they can see the ones they have already counted within the blocks of ten and one hundred.
For older students, the proportional growth of the packs of ten, hundred, and thousand lead to conversations about the ongoing relative proportion of how physically large quantities are as they get ten times larger; it is consistently a surprise to them how much space one million would take up as they are led to visualize how large ten thousand would be, how large one hundred thousand would be, and how large one million would be. In this way, the studens conceptually understand that even though we only add one digit to the number, we are making the quantity so much larger. In a similar way, the decimal fractions set allows older students to actually see how much smaller one-tenth and one one-hundredth is.
For learning resource teachers working with older struggling students, using Digi-Blocks provide opportunities to experience sense-making with the very concepts students struggle with most: place value, multiplication, and decimal fractions. Having a set of Digi-Blocks should be a required manipulative for every school.
-Glynnis Fleming
K-8 Mathematics Instructional Coach for Area 3
District School Board of Niagara
Research
The Digi-Block System is thoroughly field tested. Studies show that using Digi-Block can improve your school's math program on three fronts:
Boost Student Understanding
Improve Standardized Test Scores
Quickly Get Up to Grade Level
Proven to be Significantly Better than Traditional Manipulatives
In order to test the effectiveness of Digi-Block, Digi-Block conducted a year long study in several 1st and 2nd grade classrooms. Classrooms were split into two groups: the Digi-Block Group, and the control group (which used traditional base-10 manipulatives). At the end of the year, both groups were given the same test. The results are shown below. 25% of Digi-Block students scored 100% on the test.
Proven to Drastically Improve Standardized Test Scores
After the school adopted the Digi-Block Program, they began greatly outperforming other independent schools on standardized tests.
Successful Math Inventions in just 4 Weeks!
When Boston Public Schools adopted the Digi-Block system for their summer school program, they were blown away by the results:
Fractions and Decimals
Multiplication
Division
Subtraction
Addition
Bundles of 10
Counting and Comparing
Resources
- Introducing Full Cars
- Counting Trains
- Short and Long Trains
- Train of Tens
- Cover the Cactus
- Keep on Counting: How Many?
- The Meaning of the Equal Sign
- Make a Match
- Complete the Trains
- Ten Scoop
- Growing Cups
- Divide by .01 and .1
- Packing Up the Train: Making Bundles of 10
- All Aboard!
- Two Ways to Look at a Quantity
- Keep on Counting Trains of Ten
- Rolling Trains
- One More Passenger
- Cover the Fish
- How Many is a Cupful?
Video Resources
- How to Teach Subtraction | 7 - 4 (1:24 min)
- 678 ÷ 6 (1:45 min)
- Decimals and the Power of 10 (1:15 min)
- How to Teach Subtraction: 24-8 (3:05 min)
- 4 x 23 | Learn the Basics of Multiplication with Digi-Block (1:03 min)
- Multiplying by 10: Why We Can 'Just Add Zero' (3:01 min)
- Introduction to Digi-Block (5:34 min)
- Bundles of 10: Introducing Digi-Trains, Crossing Over to Groups of 10 (4:17 min)
- One-to-One Correspondence w Digi-Block Trains (1:43 min)
- Two Views of Number: Place Value Mat (1:36 min)
- Addition: Regrouping in Action (1:36 min)
- Two Views of Number: Addition on the Place Value Mat (1:21 min)
- Division (3:05 min)
- Multiplication (1:57 min)
- Counting and Comparing: Single Block View: Digi-Block Number Lines (2:17 min)
- Division: Equal Grouping Model (1:43 min)
- Making Connections (2:13 min)
- The Mat or the Counter? (0:20 min)
- 43 + 26 (1:06 min)
- Addition on the Two-Place Counter (2:34 min)
- Operations with Decimals (2:39 min)
- Two Views of Number (0:51 min)
- Setting the Stage: Building Blocks (2:07 min)
- Single-Digit Subtraction Modeled with Trains (3:11 min)
- Subtraction: Borrowing by Unpacking (2:19 min)
- Seeing Regrouping in Action (1:37 min)
- Why the Fractional Representation is Equivalent to the Decimal Form (4:20 min)
