Equivalent Decimals

Hi Grade 5s,

Today we talked about equivalent decimals. 

Remember: equivalent means equal.  If we're looking for equivalent decimals, we're looking for decimals that represent the same amount.

We looked at grids made up of 100 little squares in our text books today.  We saw that if, for example, 70 of the squares were coloured in, we could make the fraction 70/100.  We remembered from yesterday that we could turn 70/100 into a fraction: 0.70.

We noticed that we could count the squares on the grid by 1s, but we also noticed that the grid was made up of 10 rows of 10 (making 100).  If 70 squares were coloured in, we could also say that 7 rows of the 10 rows were coloured in.  We could turn that into a fraction, too: 7 out of 10 rows were coloured in, so the fraction is 7/10.  We can make this into a decimal, too: 0.7.

So...0.70 and 0.7 are equivalent decimals, because they represent the same number of squares coloured in our grid.

Hope that helps!

-Ms. Lewis.