What I would do is just grab a bunch of spare change and dollar bills and use a table to illustrate counting pennies. That way you can always use the dimes to represent the ten's place and a dollar to represent the 100's place.
Use the idea that it goes: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and then the 0 that was in the tens place changes to a 1, and you begin counting in the one's place again.
Should help clear stuff up to see that the ten's place counts tens of items in the same way that the one's place counts single items, the hundreds place counts hundreds of items in the same way, so on.
If she's having trouble with the abstract thinking you could even play around with showing her how hex and binary work, as that sometimes will help someone to see what really matters with numerals, oddly enough.