READING AND WRITING NUMBERS

Reading and writing numbers proves to be difficult for some students. They get confused once they begin to read numbers that are larger than 999. They even fair quite well into the initial thousands. Where they begin to have problems is when we start talking about numbers over 10 000. We stress that they use a place value chart as an aid to help them decode larger values.  The place value chart pictured below is organized in such a way as to highlight the PERIOD that the number falls under. Every 3 steps on the place value chart is referred to as a PERIOD. Each period has a 0nes, tens and hundreds column.

The difficult part is reading the numbers under one PERIOD as a whole. For instance, the number pictured above has 026 in the THOUSANDS PERIOD. The student reads that as twenty six thousand. If you look at the numbers in the MILLIONS PERIOD they read that as thirty one million. Some students get confused and read the numbers in a PERIOD separately. FOR INSTANCE, they may read thirty million one million. What's the solution---PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. GRADE 5's need to learn up to 999 999. GRADE 6'S NEED to read to the MILLIONS period. They also need to be able to write those numbers.