Numbers up to a million — for parents
In Year 4 the number range jumps from a thousand all the way to a million. The underlying idea hasn't changed — every digit sits in a place, and each place is ten times the next one to the right. But the numbers get long, and that's where most mistakes creep in.
What your child should master by the end of the year
- Read and write any number from 0 to 1 000 000.
- Identify the place of each digit (ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands).
- Split a number into its expanded form (285 472 = 200 000 + 80 000 + 5 000 + 400 + 70 + 2).
- Compare two numbers using <, > and =.
- Order a list of numbers from smallest to largest (and back).
- Round to the nearest 10, 100, 1 000, 10 000 and 100 000.
Common mistakes
Skipping a zero in the middle
Children sometimes read 5 080 as "five hundred and eighty" — they miss the zero and drop the number by a whole place.
Help: when reading a number out loud, point at each place and say its name. "Five thousands, zero hundreds, eight tens, zero ones."Comparing numbers of different lengths
A common slip is "850 > 1 200, because 8 > 1". This is the first-grade trick (compare the leftmost digit) misapplied to numbers with different lengths.
Help: count the digits first. More digits always means a bigger number.Rounding the wrong place
When rounding to the nearest hundred, children sometimes peek at the ones digit instead of the tens. So 3 472 becomes 3 470 — but that's rounded to the nearest ten, not hundred.
Help: point at the digit being rounded, then at the digit one place to the right. That second digit is the one that decides.Carry past nine
When a digit at the rounding place is 9 and the next digit is 5+, the rounded value rolls into the next column: 6 950 → 7 000, 9 800 → 10 000. This step often trips children up.
Help: picture it as marbles. Ten bags becomes a full shelf. Ten shelves becomes a cabinet. The rolling carries are just real-world packing.Things to try at home
A pocketful of coins
Tip out a handful of mixed coins. Sort them into groups of 10, then 100, then 1 000. Children see the same packing logic in real money.
"How big is a million?"
Together, work out how many seconds are in a day (86 400), how many minutes in a year (525 600), or how many people live in a town. A million is huge — and showing real-world numbers in that range makes the abstraction concrete.
Your own register
Get your child to write down their favourite big numbers — the page count of a book, the length of the nearest river in metres, the population of your town or country. Then put the list in order from smallest to largest.
How the place-value table works
We use a row of six columns (HTh | TTh | Th | H | T | O). When a child gets stuck on a number, draw a fresh table and put each digit in its column. It turns "two-hundred-and-eighty-five-thousand-four-hundred-and-seventy-two" into something they can see and count.