Teaching big numbers

This weekend I was working with one of my ebooks, writing more content for it. I thought I'd share one of the problems I was putting in it.

When you're first studying numbers in the 100,000's and millions, have the child use an encyclopedia or internet to find information such as:
  • Population in the Northeastern states
  • land area of the various Midwest states
  • the amount of distinct animal species in the 7 continents
  • number of newborn babies annually in European countries
  • some astronomical distances
...or something similar. You could try tie it in with something you're studying in other school subjects. This way, using real data, it is not just some old made-up math textbook problem.

THEN, the child is to organize the info in ascending or descending order. This lets them practice reading and writing big numbers plus comparing them.

It is sort of a hands-on exercise and ties mathematics in with real world: how math is not just for school but is something needful and useful.

You might also enjoy checking out these links: How to count to one million and beyond and Big Numbers - Two online ebooks that visualize large numbers with cubic centimeters.

Or, the Megapenny project - visualizing big numbers with help of pennies.

(Taken from my list of links for place value .)

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Comments

Murray said…
Hi Maria. One excellent resource for very small and very large numbers is at Powers of 10 from Florida State U.

Also, my World Population may be of interest.
3:38 AM, February 13, 2006
Anonymous said…
You might also be interested in a poster I made. The poster contains 1,000,000 dots. One dot is red to show just how small 1 in 1,000,000 really is.

The poster can be found here:
http://stickinsect.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/1-million-dots/
7:04 PM, January 17, 2011
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