I gave my niece a whole heap of beads and showed her how to divide it up into sets of 10 beads each. Then I showed her how she could lay out each set of I0 beads in a line, and call it a string. After she had made some strings, I told her that with 10 strings she could make a necklace.
She started making strings and necklaces with the beads, and slowly tried to form a relationship between a necklace and a string in her mind. After a bit, I asked her how many strings she would exchange for a necklace. She thought for a moment and said, "10." =then I asked her how many necklaces she could make from 107 beads. She thought for a while, and then said, "10 strings, and 7 beads will be left." I asked, "How many necklaces does that make?" To help her answer this, I asked her to actually take 107 beads and try and make as many necklaces as possible, given the fact that a necklace meant 10 strings and each string meant 10 beads.
She took the beads and ended up getting one necklace and 7 beads.
Next, I asked her how she would write that. The two of us worked out a system in which we wrote N S B -the number of necklaces was to be written below N, the number of strings below S and the number of beads below B. Under N she wrote 1 and under B she wrote 7. I asked her, "What about the number of strings?", to which she said, "There are no strings." So I asked her how she shadow that. She thought for a moment, and then wrote 0 below S.
(Note : Children may tend to ignore writing 0 in a numeral, because they think that it denotes 'nothing', and hence it need not be written. )
Then 1 wrote H T 0 above N S B, and asked her if she agreed with that. She thought for a bit, and then said that she did because 1'00 beads were one necklace and 10 beads was one string. "Fine ! Now, howmuch is 325?" I asked her. She property replied "3 necklaces, 2 strings, 5 beads." "How many beads does that make?" "Three hundred and twenty-five," she said.
After some type of such questions we played the following game. I gave her 3 digits. She was supposed to use them to make as many numerals as she could, and arrange them in decreasing order. Once 1 felt that my niece was enjoying the game, I extended it to 4 digits. And she made all possible numerals with them, including those like 0129 with 0, 1,2 and 9. 1 felt that it was very important to have her practise these ideas for a reasonable time and in a leisurely manner, without pressure.