Whether students are rounding, comparing numbers, estimating, working with money, or multiplying by powers of 10, having a firm grasp of place value builds students' number sense and confidence in their math abilities.
My dad went all the way through engineering school without a calculator. The way they'd multiply numbers with decimals back then was by multiplying the numbers without their decimals, then making an educated guess as to the final product's order of magnitude. For example, does it make sense for the product of 2.5 x 1.5 to be 375, 37.5, 3.75 or 0.375?
In this post, I want to share a few activities and other resources for teaching and supporting students learning place value.
First is this place value math word wall reference in my blog's free math resource library. It displays place vale from billions to thousandths, along with the written form of this giant number!
Students love seeing their work displayed, so I made a set of decimal rounding pumpkin pennants that double as classroom decor. After completing the problems on each pumpkin, students can color and hang their pennants to make a fun display of their work.
A teacher emailed to ask if I had a similar activity for whole numbers, so I made this version of the pumpkins for younger students. Over the years, I have made a bunch of fun math activities for the holidays, from back to school to New Year's to Pi Day. You can see all of my holiday math activities in this holiday math post.
If pumpkins aren't your thing, I made another set of place value pennants that teachers are using as warm-ups and exit tickets to build student work displays. This one is for place value with decimals. A teacher emailed to ask for a version of the place value pennants for her younger students, so I made this math pennant for place value in whole numbers.
Here's a photo a teacher sent of her students' place value math pennants hanging as a display along the top of her classroom wall. Based on the size of the chairs, these are probably the whole number place value pennants.
Rounding comes in a lot when students are building their financial literacy because multiplying numbers with decimals often causes the product's decimals to span past the hundredths place. When I taught high school consumer math, we had to spend extra time talking about how numbers would round when students were taking notes or completing classwork activities. I made this rounding decimals sheet recently as a reference for student notebooks. Still, numbers like 7.995 always threw my students for a loop!
I just recently finished making a rounding decimals escape room for students to practice rounding to different place values, from the nearest ten to the nearest thousandth. Like all digital math escape rooms, a printable PDF version is also included that comes with a student answer sheet for easy grading. The digital version is self-checking for no grading at all.
Here's puzzle 2 of a printable place value review escape room with its student answer sheet. This escape room covers making equivalent expressions using place value, comparing numbers, rounding, multiplying and dividing multi-digit numbers, and adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers.
Students can color these place value flip books that help them visualize each number's size in a multi-digit number. This is the whole number version. There's also a set for place value in decimals.
There are more place value and rounding activities to see here:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comment