What is place value? | Oxford Owl?

Place value is about how numbers work based on where their digits are.

Imagine you have 23 cookies. The 2 in 23 means twenty cookies, and the 3 means three cookies. It’s like having two big bags of ten cookies each, and three single cookies in your hand.

Each digit in a number has a job based on where it is:

• If you move the 2 from 23 to the right, making it 32, now the 2 means two cookies, and the 3 means thirty. It’s like swapping your big bags with single cookies!

• The number 456 has a 4 in the hundreds place (like four big boxes of 100), a 5 in the tens place (five bags of ten), and a 6 in the ones place (six single cookies).

You can think of it like stacking blocks. Each digit is like a different size block, hundreds, tens, and ones, that you stack up to make your number!