Number and Place Value
In Year 4 your child moves up to four-digit numbers, learning to read them, say what each digit is worth, and put them in order beyond 1000. They count on in steps of 6, 7, 9, 25 and 1000, find 1000 more or less than a number, and round to the nearest 10, 100 or 1000. None of it is as daunting as it sounds: it is really the same place value thinking they already know, stretched up to bigger numbers.
Practise Number and Place Value
Have a guess, even if you're not sure. Get one wrong and we'll show you why, so every miss is a chance to learn.
Timed practice
The same practice, just with a gentle clock. Pick a length and see how many you can answer.
Good to know
Number line to 10000
This is a number line from 0 to 10000 with a signpost every 1000, so you can see roughly where any four-digit number sits.
For grown-ups
Place value is the quiet foundation under almost everything else in Year 4. Once a child knows that the 4 in 4672 means four thousand, and that a zero can hold a place open rather than mean nothing, column addition and subtraction, money and measures all become far steadier. Rounding and reading numbers on a number line build the same sense of size and order, a feel for roughly where a number sits, and that judgement carries straight on into estimating and the larger numbers of later years.
What is in this topic
- Reading four-digit numbers and saying what each digit is worth
- Knowing that ten hundreds make a thousand, and how many hundreds are in a multiple of 100
- Ordering and comparing numbers beyond 1000
- Finding 1000 more or less than a given number
- Counting in 6s, 7s, 9s, 25s and 1000s
- Rounding to the nearest 10, 100 or 1000, and placing numbers on a number line
How to help at home
Place value clicks when a child can both see where a number sits and say what each digit is worth, so mix pointing at the number line with saying numbers out loud.
- Read big numbers in chunks, not digit by digit. For 4672 say four thousand, six hundred and seventy-two, pointing at each part, so the 4 is heard as 4000 and not just a 4.
- Practise 1000 more and 1000 less as a single hop. From 4672, a thousand more is 5672 and a thousand less is 3672, so only the thousands digit changes.
- Count the trickier steps out loud. The 6s, 7s and 9s are the ones children wobble on, so chant them little and often: 6, 12, 18, 24 and 7, 14, 21, 28.
- Round by finding the nearest signpost. To round 4672 to the nearest hundred, ask whether it is closer to 4600 or 4700: 72 is past halfway, so it rounds up to 4700.
Where children get stuck
The most common wobble is losing track of which place a digit sits in, especially when there is a zero in the middle. A child reads 4072 as four hundred and seventy-two, quietly dropping the empty hundreds, or writes three thousand and five as 305. Saying the number in full, four thousand and seventy-two, and lining the digits up in thousands, hundreds, tens and ones shows that the zero is holding the hundreds place open rather than doing nothing.
Rounding is the other sticking point, because children round to the wrong size or get stuck on what happens at exactly halfway. Rounding 4672 to the nearest 100 is not the same as rounding it to the nearest 1000, so it helps to name the two signposts first: the nearest hundreds are 4600 and 4700, and 4672 is past the halfway mark of 4650, so it rounds up to 4700. When the digit you are checking is a 5, the rule is always to round up.