Learning Decimals

For whatever reason decimals are extremely difficult for students to learn and put to practical use. That fact has been refreshed in my mind over the last few weeks as I worked with my sister in her media center with books in the library collection. The principal has been insisting she use student helpers. They have been doing some shelving of returned books.
As I worked on shelving books this past week I realized that the students seem to understand numbers left of the decimal and got those in "pretty good" order. But those to the right of the decimal threw them totally. Not only could they not get the numbers right of the decimals in order, they even mixed up the alphabet.

This served as a reminder of former years trying to teach decimals to fifth graders. It could be truly a task. Some students seemed never to be able to grasp place value and that it was not the same on both sides of the decimal. There were similarities (and maybe that is the thing that threw them.) On the left side of the decimal each succeeding place moving to the left multiplied the value by 10. But on the right side something opposite was occurring. While the number seems to be multiplied, the parts are actually smaller as you right!!! How can this be?????---has to do with that "ths" that you have to add to the place name.
Reflecting on it --- it probably is something developmental and has to do with maturity and whether the child / student has a true understanding of the place value system from the beginning.
The last year I worked I did some work with children in grades 1-3 who were not achieving in Math. It became clear to me that they were not and had not spent enough time on Math in the few years that they had already attended school. Sooooo -- if you are out there with little kiddies at home--always be sure you read, read, read with them -- but do not neglect getting them started early at home with a little math understanding and the value of numbers. You could easily do this by working with coins. Just sayin'.......