This may dispose some of them to interpret decimals as negative numbers . Some children are confused about whether the first column after the decimal point is tens or tenths. These children may be good at money and may also have had a lot of practice with two decimal place numbers. They may be good at interpreting 4.8 dollars as 4 dollars and 80 cents and 4.63 dollars as 4 dollars and sixty three cents. Veronica in Grade 5, for example, seemed to routinely think about this.
Some children are only familiar with tenths and some are only familiar with tenths and hundredths.
They know nothing about the names or values of other place value columns. In younger children, this is simply a stage of teaching. However, some older students have never learned beyond two decimal places. Click here for more details. In addition to knowing the names and size of the place value columns, students need to know the relative value of the columns.