Some resources for standard form:
I have been interested in Astronomy since discovering Patrick Moore’s books in the library as a child so enjoyed Richard Byrne’s post on resources to help students understand the size of the universe, I particularly like 100,000 Stars, a visualization of the 100,000 stars closest to Earth. All those lovely big numbers in Astronomy are excellent for teaching Standard Form; I wrote some time ago on the excellent mathematics resources available from NASA, see this on Scientific notation for example.
Staying with Astronomy, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich has some outstanding resources on TES, including Scales of the Universe (KS4 – age 14-16)
From the excellent Standards Unit, N4 on Estimating Length Using Standard Form works very well as a class activity. (You can find all the Standards Unit Resources here).
From Nrich, two activities on Standard Form.
Teachit Maths though a subscription site offers its entire collection of activities as pdfs for free. I have found many high quality resources here for all ages. – try these on Standard Form.
From TES Resources – an extensive collection of (free) Standard Form Resources, note the 5 star reviews for many resources.
For the start or end of a lesson (or any time!), you could try some Diagnostic questions on Standard Form. I created a Standard Form Quiz from these questions.
diagnosticquestions.com
(See these posts for more information on the excellent Diagnostic Questions site).
A site with plenty of big numbers is Is That A BIG NUMBER?
(Post on Is That A BIG NUMBER)
Students could be shown how to check their work on WolframAlpha
and finally some more great links including some rather good animations:
Secret Worlds: The Universe Within
You can find lots of data with very large numbers using Gapminder
Staying with world statistics, you could try Jonny Griffiths’ World-wide Statistics task from his Making Statistics Vital. You could use the figures from his spreadsheet – write the numbers in Standard Form and explore some real world Statistics at the same time.
Reblogged this on Singapore Maths Tuition and commented:
A nice post about Standard Form!
Thanks Colleeen for an (as always) inspiring post!
I also love this simulation page about the worlds CO2 Emmission which has other interesting population data, fantastic for Stanadard Form … and a nice cross-curricular link to Science: http://www.breathingearth.net/.
N4 from the Standard Unit Box is also a nice resource which gets groups of students discussing Standard Form.
Thank you Anja; you are right that is a good source of data; I also agree re N4 from the Standard Unit Resources – in fact I will update the post.
You have reminded me of some other sources – I’ll add those too!