How to Help with Math Homework: The Rounding Poem
One of the math skills learned by children around 3rd or 4th grade is how to round numbers. It is an important part of estimating, which is something adults do nearly every day when grocery shopping, paying bills or getting gas. A simple poem will help your child understand and remember how to round numbers on his math homework.
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Instructions
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Help your child memorize this poem:
"Find you number,
Look right next door,
4 or less, just ignore,
5 or more, add one more."Keep a written copy of the poem handy for use when doing rounding math homework. Some kids like to tape it to their math book, or put it in their school agenda, or post it on the fridge, or keep it somewhere by their study area.
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Explain the first line of the poem, "Find you number." When you are rounding a number, you round to a specific place value: "Round this number to nearest hundreds place."
Have your child prove that he knows which place his is rounding to by underlining that place in the digits. If the child were given the number 245,768 he should underline the 7 because it's in the hundreds place. -
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Explain the second phrase, "Look right next door." Have your child draw an arrow to the digit immediately to the right of the underlined number which, in the example 245,768 would be 6. Explain that this is the neighbor next door, and that it is very bossy! It can push the underlined number around sometimes. If it's big enough, that neighbor number can push the digit next to it right up to being a bigger number. But if the neighbor number isn't big enough, the digit next to it remains the same. It's the neighbor number that decides if the underlined digit changes or remains the same.
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Explain the next line, "4 or less, just ignore." If the neighbor with the arrow pointing to it is 4 or less, then the digit in question will stay the same. The neighbor number isn't big enough to push the digit to be bigger. All the neighbor numbers to the right then become zeros. Stress to your child that rounding always results in numbers ending with one or more zeros.
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Explain the last phrase, "5 or more, add one more." If the neighbor number is 5 or greater, it's big enough to push the underlined digit into a bigger number. Tell your child to change that number, leaving the rest of the neighbors to the left as they are, and all the ones to the right are changed to zeros.
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Tips & Warnings
--Remind the child that when rounding he will ALWAYS do steps one and two, but after that he will have to decide which to do after: step 3 or 4. That decision is based on the bossy neighbor number.
--Stress the importance of underlining and drawing the arrow. Kids often want to skip this step, then can't round properly because they don't remember which place value they were working with.
--Sometimes kids need a "place value refresher." Write a larger number on paper, then label each one with its place value (ones, tens, hundred and so on). Post it somewhere where it can be referenced.
--Sometimes the directions don't give you a place value when rounding. Instead, they will sometimes say "round to the greatest place value." Explain that this is always the largest place value, the digit farthest to the left.
--Remind your child that the underlined number will never go down. Only one of two things will happen to it: it will either stay the same, or bump up to the next number.
Modify this "story" approach to your needs. Some kids really benefit from thinking of it in a way they can relate to. But if your child is simply to cool for this, put it forward in a straight, simple manner using the same poem.
References
- Photo Credit Pixland/Pixland/Getty Images
