To help my fifth graders still struggling with place value, I draw a train with several cars. Each car has three seats. Each seat is numbered ones, tens, hundreds. The seats are left blank to fill in with a desired number. Each car's roof is also labled with hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, etc. Each car is connected to the next with a comma. The last car is connected to the other cars with a dot and its seats are labeled tenths, hundredths and thousandths. The students are taught to start with the first car on the left and read the numbers in the car and then the car name then move to the next car on the right. The graphic seems to help and I have used it at all grade levels.