Fun Place Value Chart [+ Teaching Tips and 8 Activities]
All Posts- Three printable place value charts to help you teach your students
- How Prodigy can help your students master place value
- A quick refresher on place value, plus tips for teaching it
- 8 fun activities to use during your place value lessons
Printable place value chart
Many learners understand place value best when they work with the numbers themselves. A place value chart gives students the chance to see the value of digits, numbers and decimals in our base ten number system.Here are three charts to use with your students as they learn place value! Plus, we've made it easy for you to choose between colorful and printer-friendly options.Blank place value chart
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Place value chart to billions
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- 252,088 miles — The furthest distance between Earth and the moon
- 7,581,154,200 — The world population in June 2019, as estimated by the US Census Bureau
- 8,398,748 — The population of New York City as of July 1st, 2018
- 35,800,000 miles — The distance between Earth and Mars at the closest point in Mars’s orbit
Decimal place value chart
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Use Prodigy to teach place value!
Want so much more than just a place value chart? Prodigy is a no-cost, curriculum-aligned math platform that makes learning math fun! Students will explore an exciting world filled with adventure, where success depends on correctly answering skill-building math questions.
- How to use Prodigy to reinforce in-class lessons
- How to use Prodigy as a relevant entry or exit ticket
- How to use Prodigy to prep for standardized tests

What is place value?
Place value is the value of a digit as determined by its position in a number. Students learn place value to understand that every number is made up of digits. These digits -- 0-9 -- have different values depending on their place in the number. Up until this point, students have been learning numbers as a continuous sequence. They don’t necessarily understand the base ten system or realize numbers are made up of other numbers.View this post on Instagram
How to teach your students about place value
Whole numbers
The best way to start teaching students about place value is through hands-on examples. Using pebbles, beans or other small objects, ask the students to count out 17. Explain to students they can divide 17 into a group of ten and a group of seven. In 17, the one represents the group of ten and the seven represents seven ones.Do this a few more times, with a larger number each time. (For example, move from 17 to 24, then to 43). Use a place value chart to explain that each digit in the tens column represents groups of ten. For example, a four in the tens column would represent 40, which is four groups of ten. This is a good time to start teaching some of the vocabulary around numbers and place value students will need to know.Standard form: The number, written as usual.Example: 3,453Written form: The number written out using words instead of digits.
Example: three thousand four hundred fifty threeExpanded form: The number written out as the product of the digit multiplied by the place value.
Example: (3 x 1000) + (4 x 100) + (5 x 10) + (3 x 1)Expanded form is an excellent way to illustrate place value with students who have already learned the basics of multiplication. With each place further to the left, the value of the digit is multiplied by ten. Students should also be able to use the less than (<), greater than (>) or equal to (=) signs to express the relationship between two numbers as a sentence:
3,453 > 2,232
“3,453 is greater than 2,232.”
Do your students struggle with the difference between these signs or with expressing which number is greater? Try these tricks to help them remember:- The Hungry Alligator — The greater than (>) or less than (<) signs are an alligator’s mouth, and the number on either side represents a number of fish. The alligator always wants to eat the largest number of fish, so the mouth is always open towards the larger number.
- Read out loud — Students aren’t used to this kind of mathematical language. Make sure students can express this as a sentence in their writing and reading, and they understand “greater” refers to the amount, not the quality, of the number.
- Teach students to look at the greatest place value first — Students should realize the digit furthest to the left has the greatest place value. If those are the same, teach students to move towards the right until they find a number that’s greater.
≥ Greater than or equal to
≤ Less than or equal to
≠Does not equal
Decimals
Instead of getting larger to the left, decimals move to the right and get progressively smaller. Place value in whole numbers is determined by multiples of ten, but the place value of decimals is based on multiplying by ⅒. There are a few terms students should understand before diving into decimal place value:- Decimal point — The point that marks where the whole number ends and the decimal begins. When written out in word form, a decimal point is expressed with “and.”
- Tenth — ⅒ of a whole, the first place value directly to the right of the decimal.
- Hundredth — ¹⁄₁₀₀ of a whole, the second place value to the right of the decimal.
- Money
- Timing a race
- Measuring objects
28.18
Twenty eight and eighteen hundredths
Instead of multiplying by decimals to expand the decimal place, decimals in expanded form can be more accurately represented when we multiply the digit by the appropriate fraction. Since decimals are numbers less than one, each place value can be represented as a fraction.0.1 = ⅒ = one tenth
0.01 = ¹⁄₁₀₀ = one hundredth
0.001 = ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ = one thousandth
The decimal point in the example above can be expressed as 18 hundredths, or ¹⁸⁄₁₀₀.This means 28.18 could also be expressed as:(2 x 10) + (8 x 1) + (1 x ⅒) + (8 x ¹⁄₁₀₀) = 28.18
Activities for teaching place value
1. Number walk

- All the numbers with four digits
- All the numbers with a zero in the ones place
- All the numbers with a three in the tens place
2. Bingo
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3. Abacus

4. Money
There’s a good chance your students have already identified money as being one practical application of place value, both for whole numbers and decimals. Money encourages abstract thinking. With whole numbers, students can easily use one, 10 and 100 dollar bills to understand how digits can represent large values.Students can also learn how to work with decimals using dimes and pennies. Explain that one dime is worth one-tenth of a dollar. Link money back to earlier lessons on decimal place value to help students recognize decimals as parts of the whole numbers they’re used to working with. As a fun activity, divide students into groups and give each one three piles of one dollar bills, ten dollar bills, dimes and pennies. Using a place value chart, students can put the piles in order from least to greatest, and write out the number in standard, expanded and word form.5. Number stories

6. Manipulatives
Tried and true, manipulatives are an excellent way for hands-on learners to understand more abstract concepts like place value. There are two types of manipulatives you can use to teach place value:- Literal manipulatives such as base ten blocks, beans or marbles represent one unit as equaling one number. With place value, literal representation can help students see exactly how many groups of ten or a hundred are in a number.
- Representative manipulatives are objects like counting chips or colored paper, where each color represents ones, tens, hundreds or thousands. These manipulatives help students understand how a single object or digit can represent a very large number.
7. Dice roll

When to use a place value chart in your classroom
Place value is a foundational math concepts your students need to understand clearly in order to move on to more difficult units. Use a place value chart in your classroom to run some of the activities above, or as a tool for students to use as they’re completing their work. When students understand how to build bigger and bigger numbers, there’s no limit to what they’ll be able to learn!Prodigy is a no cost, adaptive math platform that's loved by over a million teachers and 50 million students. Log in or sign up today to see what it can do in your classroom!
