Exploring Decimals - The Complete Series (5 lessons)

With lesson plans, slides, activity ideas, differentiated worksheets and more, these Year 5 'Exploring Decimals' lessons provide you with all you need to teach decimals in an engaging way (with the help of some funny animal characters!).

The first lesson in this series explores the relationship between fractions and decimals. Your class will learn how to convert tenths and hundredths expressed as fractions to decimals, and vice versa. They will also identify the value of each digit in numbers with two decimal places. The main activity is full of fun activities to consolidate their learning, including constructing a two-digit number that has been decomposed, whilst the alternative activity will have them playing bingo to help them practise converting fractions to decimals.

This lesson starts by challenging children to estimate where a given decimal would be placed on a number line, before showing them how number lines can be used to help them compare decimals. They will then move on to ordering sets of numbers with up to two decimal places, and identify numbers that can go between two decimals on a number line. The main activity has a simple game that will get children competing to get the largest number, whilst the alternative activity will have them going ‘beanbag bowling’, using their measurements to compare decimals!

Your class will learn how to round numbers with one and two decimal places to the nearest whole number in this lesson. The slides go through a clear explanation of how to do this as well as giving your children some practise as a class. They can then practise this for themselves or undertake some investigations to consolidate their skills.

Building on their learning from the previous lesson, children will learn how to round amounts of money to the nearest whole pound. The slides recap how to do this, before going on to rounding different amounts to the nearest whole pound, adding the amounts together to find an approximate price. Children are encouraged to work out answers mentally wherever possible. Children can then use a menu to round amounts of money to see how approximately how much different customers spent on their meals. Alternatively, they can do some online 'shopping’ of their own!

The final lesson in this series recaps how to round numbers with one and two decimal places to the nearest whole number, before exploring how numbers with two decimal places can be rounded to the nearest tenth. The slides give lots of opportunities to practise this, before challenging them to add their rounded decimals together. Their independent learning activities are full of fun games to reinforce this, including some group challenges that will have them carefully solving problems relating to everything they have learnt about decimals to score the maximum number of points!