Mrs. Reid's Grade 6: Ordering & Comparing REALLY BIG numbers!

Hello everyone!

* First off let me apologize for the delay in posting. My toddler, my laptop and a juice box had an unfortunate accident which led to a fried motherboard. It took a few weeks, but I am back up and running!

We have finished math unit #1 (number patterns) and have moved onto unit #2. Unit #2 is all about numbers. We are starting by looking at REALLY BIG numbers...like hundreds of millions big! We kicked off the unit by reading "How Much Is A Million?" by David Schwartz. Using our reading strategy of visualization, this book really helped us create a better picture in our minds about just how big a million really is. For example, we learned that if you didn't stop to rest or take a break, it would take about 23 days to count to 1,000,000! The book also gave us some great tips and strategies for figuring out how to estimate and calculate with REALLY BIG numbers.

Another activity we have done involved ordering and comparing these REALLY BIG numbers. Each student was given a strip of paper with a large number on it. The numbers ranged from the hundred thousands to the hundred millions. Students were asked to organize themselves from least to greatest in a line at the front of the class. There was great math talk going on as students used their place value knowledge to figure out which numbers were bigger and where they should be on our class sized number line. Our final product looked like this.