#placevaluechat – Chris Hunter

What number is this?

123? 12.3? 1.23? One has to ask oneself one question: Which one is one?

Earlier this year, I was invited into a classroom to introduce decimals. We had been representing and describing tenths concretely, pictorially, and symbolically. We finished five minutes short, so I gave the students a blank hundred-frame and asked them to show me one half and express this in as many ways as they could.

As expected, some expressed this as 5/10 and 0.5. They used five of the ten full ten-frames it takes to cover an entire hundred-frame. Others expressed this as 50/100 and 0.50. They covered the blank hundred-frame with fifty dots. I was listening for these answers.

One student expressed this as 2/4. I assumed he just multiplied both the numerator and denominator of 1/2 by 2. And then he showed me this:

One student expressed this as 500/1000 and 0.500. I assumed he was just extending the pattern(s). “Yeahbut where do you see the 500 and 1000?” I ~~asked~~ challenged. “I imagine that inside every one of these *points to a dot* there is one of these *holds up a full ten-frame*,” he explained. As his teacher and I listened to his ideas, our jaws hit the floor.

In my previous post, I discussed fractions, decimals, place value, and language. To come full circle, what if we took a closer look at 0.5, 0.50, and 0.500? These are equivalent decimals. That is, they represent equivalent fractions: “five tenths,” “fifty hundreds,” “five hundred thousandths,” respectively. From a place-value-on-the-left-of-the-decimal-point point of view, 0.5 is five tenths; 0.50 is five tenths and zero hundredths; 0.500 is five tenths, zero hundredths, zero thousandths. Equal, right?

Hat Tip: Max Ray‘s inductive proof of Why 2 > 4

Professor Triangleman posed an interesting question a few weeks back:

We know about improper fractions. What about improper decimals? #placevaluechat

— Christopher (@Trianglemancsd) May 7, 2013

If 15/10 is an improper fraction, then shouldn’t 1.5 be an improper decimal? Or is 1.5 a mixed decimal, having more in common with the mixed fraction 1 5/10? Both? Neither?

One definition of decimal:

A fraction whose denominator is a power of ten and whose numerator is expressed by figures placed to the right of a decimal point.

Thus, in 1.5, the implied denominator is 10 and the implied numerator is 5, the figure to the right of the decimal point. We read 1.5 as “one and five tenths,” a mixed decimal. The whole number part is treated separately, making an improper decimal an impossibility.

But what if we didn’t just look at the figures to the right? Nested tenths don’t stop/start at the decimal point. What if we looked at all the figures? We’d read 1.5 as “fifteen tenths,” an improper decimal.

Maybe the improper vs. mixed comparison is throwing me off track. Fractions can be classified as either proper or improper. Why not decimals? Decimals less than one, such as 0.5, would be proper; decimals greater than or equal to one, such as 1.5, would be improper (or, in Britain, top-heavy).

Christopher Danielson wasn’t trying to introduce new vocabulary to the world of math(s). Probably. Rather, he was making a point about place-value.

@mpershan Yeah. That's the conclusion I came to also. I'm thinking we don't spend enough time exploring how many tenths 1.5 is.

— Christopher (@Trianglemancsd) May 7, 2013

When we teach decimals using ten-frames we do.

If the whole is one full ten-frame, students may build 3.7 like this:

Students will describe 3.7 as “3 ones and 7 tenths,” “37 tenths,” or even “2 wholes and 17 tenths.” This mirrors what students know about place value and whole numbers: 37 can be described as “3 tens and 7 ones,” “37 ones,” or even “2 tens and 17 ones.”

Just like with whole numbers, thinking about place value makes calculations with decimals easier. For example, consider 4.8 + 3.6:

4 and 3 make 7
0.8 (“8 tenths”) and 0.6 (“6 tenths”) make 1.4 (“14 tenths”)
7 and 1.4 (“1 and 4 tenths”) make 8.4 (“8 and 4 tenths”)

Note the shift in thinking, not notation, from 1.4 as “14 tenths” to 1.4 as “1 and 4 tenths.” With fractions, it’s a shift in thinking and notation. Probably why we know about improper fractions but not improper decimals.

Blackline Masters:

Ten-Frames – Full
Ten-Frames – Less-Than-Ten
Ten-Frames – Place Value Mat