Download expanded form teaching resources designed to make math more fun this school year and make your math centers easier to plan! Every resource on the Teach Starter website has been created by an expert teacher and reviewed by another team of expert teachers to ensure they’re ready for your classroom and your students. Get students thinking about how large numbers can be broken down into individual place values and better understand their value with resources aligned with Common Core math.

New to teaching this section of the math curriculum, or just looking for some tips on engaging your students? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including an explanation of what expanded form is, how it helps kids break down multi-digit whole numbers and how it relates to place value.

What Is Expanded Form? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Let's start with a student-friendly way to introduce expanded form to your math class! Here's a definition our maths teachers use in the classroom: Expanded form is a way of representing a number as the sum of its place values by breaking the number down into its individual parts. Writing a number in this form shows the value of each digit in the number.

Expanded Form Examples — How to Write Numbers in Expanded Form

A definition is helpful, but how do you make this concept more concrete for your young learners and help them understand how to write numbers in this format themselves? Expanded form examples, of course! Let's take the number 345. When we break it down, this number has:

A 3 in the hundreds place
A 4 in the tens place
A 5 in the ones place

To write the number 345 in expanded form, we would create an addition problem: 300 + 40 + 5 If you add these three numbers back together, you will end up with 345!

Teaching Expanded Form

Expanded form activities are often pulled out in the first few weeks of the school year, but you might consider adding these to your math centers all year for a few reasons!

It helps younger math students understand the value of zeros in those longer three- and four-digit numbers.
It helps students understand how the digits 0, 1, and 2 form multi-digit numbers.

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