Learning about Place Value

Erik has been struggling to grasp the concept of place value, so we've been trying to find ways to make it more understandable. His school was doing a coin-wars fundraiser, so we pulled out our coin  jar and I set him to work counting sorting them out. 

We counted each kind of coin separately from the rest, starting with the smallest pile. He'd take a pile of coins (let's say dimes, for example) and sort them into piles of 10. Once we had all our piles of ten we counted how many piles and wrote the number on a white board. I pointed out that there was only enough room for us to write one digit in the space, so we had to figure out how to regroup the coins and write them digits in the correct space.
We did this same process with each of the different types of coins. I think by the time we were done he had a much better understanding of place value, though he still doesn't quite have it mastered. We'll keep working on it, but we're almost there.