Place Value – Year 6

What is Place Value?

Place Value is the value of each digit in a number and understanding that the value of a digit can change depending on where it is (its place) in the number. For example, in the number 672 the value of the 6 is 600, the 7 is 70 and the 2 is 2. However, in the number 267, the digit 2 is now 200, the 6 is 60 and the 7 is 7 ones.

This page aims to provide you with all the Year 6 Place Value National Curriculum objectives, along with some guidance for each objective and a range of games and activities that can be used to meet the learning objective in a play-based way.

Teaching Year 6 Place Value:
National Curriculum ObjectiveThings to think about …Playful Learning Games
Read, write, order and compare numbers
up to 10,000,000 and determine the value of each digit
Children will be expected to read, write, compare, and order numbers up to ten million. 

They should know the value of each digit in numbers up to ten million.

For this objective, focus on how to say numbers correctly and use the correct vocabulary when comparing numbers.
Place Value Connect 4

Compare It!

Build the Number
Round any whole number to a required degree of accuracyChildren will learn to round any whole number to the nearest 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000.

In Year 5, children learned to round any number up to 1,000,000 to any power of 10 up to 100,000 and in Year 6 they consolidate this and also round to the nearest million.

Number lines are a useful resource for rounding.
Rounding Fortune Tellers
Use negative numbers in context, and calculate intervals across 0.In Year 6, children will count forwards and backwards in positive and negative whole numbers.

It’s important to use real-life context to explore negative numbers.

In this objective, children will also be adding and subtracting from positive and negative numbers and learning to find the difference between numbers.
The Heat is On

Start at 0
Solve number and practical problems that involve
all of the above
For all of the objectives above, children should be exposed to problem solving and reasoning questions.

Ensure children are given full access to a range of resources to use when solving these types of problems.
Place Value Problems
(links to other websites)