Place Value Rap

My kids can’t listen to this song too much. It drives me crazy after a while. However, the lyrics are powerful. Try to get the kids to be able to rap it without the music playing. It”s very possible. My kids had it down pat in a couple of months of listening to the CD.

Here’s some explanation for some of the lyrics:

Starting at the decimal, sandwiched in between

Zeroes hold the empty places, haven’t you seen?

When you consider the place values that come between significant digits and the decimal point, if a place contains no numbers, a zero is needed in order to hold that place. For example, in the number 2.04, the zero is sandwiched between the 4 and the decimal. Therefore the zero is important because it holds the tenths place.

Reading big numbers each comma’s a word

“Thousand, Million, Billion,” commas, haven’t you heard? Word!

This is helping kids with reading larger numbers. Did you realize that commas indicate a special word. For example, to read 30,008,400 we say 30 million, eight thousand, four hundred. The first comma we come to say, “Million,” and the second comma we read, “Thousand.” In the song, the students learn these words for the commas starting at the decimal point and working to the left.

Let’s take it to the right of the decimal point

We’ve got tenths, hundredths, thousandths, ten thousandths

Smaller than a 1 with a T H

The place values to the right of the decimal point all sound just like those to the left with one exception. The places on the right all include T H at the end of the word. Also, all these places represent values less than one whole.

As is true of all the songs, singing this song is not a replacement for clear instruction and practice. Whether the song is introduced before or after the instruction, kids still need explicit teaching on the concept of place value. The song simply acts as a mnemonic device to help them when they get stuck.