How To Use Place Value To Inform Estimations In Real Life Contexts

Hi, my name is Ben, and we're going to be looking at how you can use place value to help you with your estimates. Imagine that you had a jar of sweets and that you asked the children in your class or your group to estimate how many sweets there were in the jar. You would have probably a large range of estimates. So using place value will really help. This is the place value chart. In our ones, we run from 1 to 9, in the tens, from 10 to 99 in, in the hundreds, 100 to 999 and in the thousands, 1,000 to 9,999 and so on. Again, you could show the children the jar of suites and then you could rule out which they didn't think it was. So are there going to be between one and nine sweets in there? Unlikely. Are there going to be more than a thousand sweets? Again, unlikely. So just by using the place value chart straight away, we've ruled out two columns. Then you could look at the suites again and you can draw on their life experiences. You can look at it and think, well, what would 10 suites look like? Or what would 20 suites look like? Or maybe if you pulled some out, what would half the suites look like? If I said to you, there are 400 children in the school, would each child be able to have a jelly bean? If the answer is yes, then that would be a good estimate. And that's how you can use place value columns to give you a much clearer and accurate estimation.