I love teaching scientific notation. It’s so organized and it helps to conceptualize really large and small numbers. I mean, these are the numbers scientists use in real life and you get to talk about space. All of those things just make my little math heart burst with joy. We don’t teach scientific notation until December, but it’s something I look forward to every year. I know that my students can feel my enthusiasm, and we just have a lot of fun with it. [Read more…] about How to teach scientific notation with interactive notebooks
scientific notation
10 Activities to Make Practicing Scientific Notation Awesome
Scientific notation is such a great topic to study because it shows students a really practical application in math. I love how it makes sense that you would actually use scientific notation in many different situations. It’s fun to illustrate really, really big numbers, and really, really small numbers. Plus, these numbers show up again and again in students’ science classes. Scientific notation activities help students see just how practical and prevalent these numbers really are. I’m excited to share with you 10 activity ideas that are sure to be hits in your classroom.
Plus, converting to and from scientific notation seems to make sense to kids. I feel like this is a concept where students can have a lot of success. Whenever we get to a topic like this, not only do I want students to get it and rock it, I also want to leverage their success with this topic to feel more confidence in math and be willing to try harder on other topics.
[Read more…] about 10 Activities to Make Practicing Scientific Notation Awesome9 Operations with Scientific Notation Activities
Are you looking for ways to practice operations with scientific notation? You’re in the right place. In this post I’ll share 9 10 practice activities you can immediately use in your classroom that support students effort in learning how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract numbers written in scientific notation.
You can also read more about how to plan out the teaching for this topic, or how to introduce operations with scientific notation through a discovery activity in two other posts I’ve written about teaching operations with scientific notation. [Read more…] about 9 Operations with Scientific Notation Activities
Teaching Operations with Scientific Notation
Teaching operations with scientific notation has been a tough topic for me to teach in the past. I feel like every time I teach something it becomes easier and easier to teach. I learn from the students what works and what doesn’t. As I teach I also learn nuances about the topic that help me to support my students better. Teaching how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract two numbers that are in scientific notation lives as one of the greatest example of this process for me. [Read more…] about Teaching Operations with Scientific Notation
Teaching Scientific Notation: 4 Questions to Help Students Understand
When teaching students how to convert numbers from standard notation to scientific notation and back the other way, it’s a common practice to teach them the steps. However, this approach risks reducing this concept to a series of steps that students may or may not remember later. Instead of approaching converting with scientific notation as a set of procedures, I find that teaching students how to think about the process really helps it stick.
Here’s how I use 4 questions when teaching scientific notation to get students thinking about numbers and converting between standard and scientific notation.
[Read more…] about Teaching Scientific Notation: 4 Questions to Help Students Understand
