Expanded Form Teaching Resources

Teach students about expanded form and how to write numbers this way with printable worksheets, activities, and more teacher-created resources made for Australian teachers.

Get students thinking about how large numbers can be broken down into individual place values and better understand their value with resources aligned with the Australian curriculum — including version 9.0!

New to teaching this section of the maths curriculum, or just looking for some tips on engaging your students? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including an explanation of what expanded form is, how it helps kids break down multi-digit whole numbers and how it relates to place value.

What Is Expanded Form? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Let's start with a student-friendly way to introduce expanded form to your maths class! Here's a definition our maths teachers use in the classroom:

Expanded form is a way of representing a number as the sum of its place values by breaking the number down into its individual parts. Writing a number in this form shows the value of each digit in the number.

Expanded Form Examples — How to Write Numbers in Expanded Form

A definition is helpful, but how do you make this concept more concrete for your young learners and help them understand how to write numbers in this format themselves? Expanded form examples, of course!

Let's take the number 345. When we break it down, this number has:

• A 3 in the hundreds place
• A 4 in the tens place
• A 5 in the ones place

To write the number 345 in expanded form, we would create an addition problem:

300 + 40 + 5

If you add these three numbers back together, you will end up with 345!