Materials: Guidelines

Surprisingly high level students have trouble putting numbers like "45,085,020" into words. This is partly because many other countries don't use our system of dividing digits into groups of threes (thousands / millions / billions).

The first sheet "Big Number Game" can be used to present these patterns in a fairly intuitive way (I think). The students read the verbal description of numbers and write the numerical equivalent alongside. This is not as difficult as it might at first seem, because the numbers are listed in ascending order and one extra digit is added at a time so that there are two or three numbers "of a certain length" followed by two or three numbers with one more digit ... and so on. In some places I've tried to include pairs of numbers that presented listening / pronunciation problems for my students. You may or may not want to focus on this.

Students can compare their answers when they've finished but it's also a good idea to check them as a whole group to make absolutely sure they've got them correct. It may be a good idea to ask the class to use pencils to write their initial answers if you think they are going to make many mistakes.

The cards contain exactly the same numbers as the sheet. They can be used in two ways and both are best achieved with students in pairs. Firstly, for basic practice, one student presents each card in turn to his partner who has to identify it in words as quickly as possible. If you have a competitive group, you might want to do this as a race.

Once they are getting quite confident, it's time to move on to the second game. For this, you will need to return briefly to the work-sheet to complete the gapped sentences, and practice them a few times. Once these are being reliably produced, you can demonstrate / explain the game.

Again, in pairs, one student takes a card and hides it from the partner. The student with the card then asks the other student questions to try to make her / him say the number on the card (i.e. he / she is trying to elicit the number on the card). Once everybody has understood what they have to do, the various pairs can proceed through their pack of 21 cards. If you want to add a competitive element, you could make it a race to see which partnership can finish first.

In the table below, the first row is for the "Big Number Game" worksheet and the second row is for the "Game Cards".

You have a choice of two different methods of getting this handout to your printer. It all depends on whether your computer has "Adobe Acrobat Reader" installed. If it has, then this would be the recommended method for printing out the worksheet. Try selecting the "PDF (Adobe Acrobat)" link below. If all goes well, a new application window should appear including a print button, which when selected will print out one copy.

If, on the other hand you do not have "Adobe Acrobat" select the "HTML (web page)" link below. (Also, this method is recommended for users of Netscape Navigator, which seems to have trouble interacting with the Acrobat program like this.) If all goes well, a new browser window will open, from which you can either click the "print button" on the toolbar or open the "File" menu, select "Print" and then adjust the "Print Dialog Box" to your own preferences.

The final link below is to enable you to print this "instruction page" if you want to. Click on the link, and when the page appears on a new screen you will be able to print it using the browser's "print button" or "file menu". After printing, close the window again so that you can continue to navigate around the site.

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