Rounding With Mixed Decimals, Essay Example

While in lower grades, children need to be taught about how to work with mixed decimals, as they make up a significant part of the daily encounters. A mixed decimal include any number written in form of a whole number and a fraction or decimal. One important task for the children to know is how to round the mixed decimals to different place values, including tenths, hundredths, and thousandths, among others. However, due to the similarity between these place values and those of whole numbers, children may develop a wide range of misconceptions and errors, meaning that teaching them to round off the decimals should address such issues. The current essay explores how to teach sixth-grade students on how to round off mixed decimals to the nearest tenth, including some of the possible misconceptions and errors.

Prior to teaching the activity, the students should have prerequisite skills or knowledge on place value and rounding of whole numbers. Such an understanding will be essential to ensure that they understand the meaning of place value and rounding off numbers to nearest place values, as well as the various rules or factors considered in the activities. Building on this knowledge, the current activity will strive to help the sixth graders to learn place values (most notably, tenths and hundredths) of mixed decimals, rounding to nearest tenths, and the rules considered in rounding off the decimals.

Number lines will be used to teach the first concept, that is, the different place values of mixed decimals. The task will start by teaching the students the tenth place value of simple numbers (for example, decimals numbers between 0 to 1) and afterwards, that of large numbers (for example, mixed decimals between 11 and 12). After placing the first five decimals in the number lines, the teacher will point to the remaining points (one at a time) and ask the students to say correctly the decimals represented by the points (for instance, ‘zero’ point ‘seven’). Later, the same tasks will be repeated with hundredth place value. The next series of activities will involve teaching the sixth graders how to round off the decimals to closest tenth.

The first activity will entail teaching them about the rules considered when carrying out the task. First, the teacher will inform and demonstrate to them that the hundredth place value is considered to know whether to round up the digit at the tenth place value or to leave it unchanged. May be, telling them that they need to consider the value of the second digit to the right of the decimal point may help them to understand the rule better. Secondly, the students will be taught that the digit at the tenth place value is left unchanged when the digit at the hundredth place value is either 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 (that is, less than five). The next activity will entail teaching them to understand that they should add 1 to the tenth digit if the hundredth digit is 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 (that is, equal or less than five). In both situations, the teacher will use examples to make them understand they should drop all numbers to the right of the tenth digit after increasing or not increasing it by one. Teaching the rules will rely on rounding worksheets, number lines, and examples to ensure that the students understand every rule appropriately. To evaluate their understanding and to identify any procedural and conceptual mistakes, the teacher will from time to time ask questions during teaching sessions to prompt students to round off various mixed decimals to the closest tenth. In addition, after-activity quizzes will also be used to assess the individual performance of the students on every activity and identify conceptual errors specific to every student. After doing several examples, the teacher will also pick students randomly to work out other similar examples on the board to assess the extent to which the whole class has understood the concepts.

Despite such activities, there are various theoretical and procedural mistakes the students will likely experience during teaching. Differentiating between tens and tenth will present a conceptual error likely to remain a challenge for the students during the lesson. This will likely lead the students to make various procedural errors when working out the decimals to the closest tenth. As a result, they may misapply the process of rounding whole numbers to mixed decimals. For instance, they may round off to nearest tens, instead of tenth (for example, 3027.32 to 3030.32 instead of 3027.3), count the decimal place values from right to left of the decimal point, instead of from left to right of the point (for example, round off 33.2783 to 33.278 instead of 33.3), or drop every number to the right of the tenth place value without adding one when necessary (for instance, round 10.176 and 10.134 to 10.1 in both cases instead of 10.2 in the first example). To address these misconceptions, the teacher will use many examples and many after-activity quizzes to help the students master the concepts and steps required to perform the task.

In conclusion, sixth-grade students can be taught how to round off mixed decimals to the closest tenth through use of number line, examples, after-task quizzes, and rounding worksheets. Such methods present effective ways to address any misconceptions that the students may develop, thereby helping them understand the rounding off procedure and associated rules.