Place Value
In Year 6, children work with whole numbers all the way up to ten million. They read and write them in figures and in words, say exactly what each digit is worth, and learn to handle the awkward numbers that have one or more zeros sitting in the middle holding a column open. It is the year place value stretches to its biggest scale before secondary school.
Practise 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
A big number in place-value columns
Splitting a number into columns shows what each digit is really worth. Read it in groups of three from the right.
Three million, seven hundred and twenty-five thousand
For grown-ups
Place value at this stage is less about new sums and more about reading and comparing very large numbers with confidence: ordering them, and rounding any number to whatever degree of accuracy is asked for, from the nearest ten to the nearest million. Children also work with negative numbers and count back through zero, seeing a number line stretch in both directions, and they notice that each column is worth ten times the one to its right. This secure sense of size and accuracy is what later work on decimals, estimation and large-number calculation all rests on.
What is in this topic
- Place value of each digit in numbers up to 10,000,000
- Reading and writing large numbers in words and figures
- Comparing and ordering large numbers
- Rounding any number to a required degree of accuracy
- Negative numbers and counting through zero
- How each place-value column is ten times the next
How to help at home
Place value at this stage is less about new sums and more about confidently reading and handling very large numbers, plus negatives. Short, regular bursts of saying numbers out loud build that fluency far better than one long sit-down session.
- Read big numbers aloud by chopping them into threes from the right: 3725000 becomes 3, then 725, then 000, which says three million, seven hundred and twenty-five thousand.
- Practise the tricky zeros in the middle. Cover the number 4070000 and ask what each digit is worth: the 4 is four million, the 7 is seventy thousand, and the zeros are holding the empty columns so nothing slides over.
- Round together by pointing at the deciding digit. To round 2748 to the nearest hundred, look only at the tens digit (4), and since it is below 5 it rounds down to 2700.
- Count through zero out loud both ways: -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and back down again, so crossing zero feels as ordinary as any other step.
Where children get stuck
The most common slip is dropping the middle zeros, so a child reads 4070000 as four hundred and seventy thousand instead of four million, seventy thousand. The fix is to keep the digits in their groups of three and read each group as a whole: 4, then 070, then 000, where the zeros are doing the important job of holding empty columns open.
The other frequent wobble is with negative numbers, where children assume -8 is bigger than -3 because 8 is bigger than 3. A number line drawn through zero settles it: -8 sits further to the left, so it is actually the smaller, colder number, and asking 'which is closer to zero?' makes the order click.