Traditionally, various meanings of "10" are systematically ignored in early childhood curriculum and children's understanding of numbers is restricted within the solitary mapping between the symbol "10" and quantity concept of "ten." This may be problematic for other ways that mathematics is used, both in modern life and in modern early childhood education. For instance, coding (i.e. programming) has been advocated as a developmentally appropriate activity for children in preschool. However, in coding, where all numbers are represented by combinations of 0's and 1's, "10" represents the value of two, not ten; and "100" represents the value of four, not "one hundred." In order to address the generally neglected area of early childhood mathematics about the symbolic nature of multi-digit numerals, the authors were motivated to design and conduct an empirical study with the following goals: (1) to investigate the pedagogical potential resulting from educators developing story-themed learning resources designed to illustrate the power of compound-digit numbers; and (2) to analyze how their story-development experiences changed their mathematics teaching beliefs and practices. Due to length limitations, the current paper is only focused on the first part of the scope described. To help preservice teachers learn about using compound symbols to represent numbers so they could better teach the topic, the authors introduced their participants to activities involving the base-5 numeration system, in which the value five was represented by "10," and they used these activities as the basis for developing their own mathematics-themed stories about compound symbols. The specific research questions guiding this study were: (1) What strategies did the participating pre-service early childhood educators use to contextualize quantity with compound symbols within their stories? (2) What varieties of pedagogical components did they employ to conceptualize quantity with compound symbols?