2. Houses are built with the family members inside: dad Hundreds, mom Tens, and baby Ones. Weirdly enough the family next door all have the same names! Except their last names are different - Thousands and Millions (or take it further if you want.)
3. There are dogs in the yards between the houses (note the tail on the commas!)
4. Apartments are smaller than houses so we build the decimal apartments (I suppose you could call them townhomes.) The apartments hold single people - Tenths, Hundredths, Thousandths...
5. My students wanted to embellish with cars and street markings. You'll note one of the above made the houses each bigger than the next - I LOVED that idea. The other students put "No dogs allowed" to remember that decimals don't need commas between them. I let them make the street their own with whatever hints/tips they want to use.
As added fun for learning place value, somewhere along the way I picked up the hint of "lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" to remember how many numbers before needing a comma when working with large place value (of course, working from right to left with numbers.) Sadly, a lot of my students don't know the context of that so I found a clip on YouTube to reconnect them with the "Wizard of Oz."