Page 16 - My FlipBook

Notes for Parents & Teachers:

- When writing down big numbers with lots of zeroes after the 1, it is very easy for children - and adults! - to
make mistakes. That is why the 'Powers of 10' notation is such a useful thing. Through this book, children can
be taught how to use it - all they need to do is to count the number of zeroes to the right of the 1, and write

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that number as a superscript of 10. For instance, 1000, which has 3 zeroes after the 1, can be written as 10 .
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And 10000000 (7 zeroes after the 1), can be compactly written as 10 . Simple!

- In this book, we stopped our 'How far is far?' game at the Sun. If you want to take the game further, you may
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want to bring in the nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri, which is 10 m away from the Sun. Or the
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distance from one end of the Milky Way to another, which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 10 ) m!
- One thing you should know is that the distances that are given in the book are approximate, not exactly

accurate. For example, 3984 km is given as 4000 km. This is not 'unscientific'. Rough estimates are very useful

in science! Maybe you can do an activity with the kids to emphasize this. Is the length of a pencil closer to 10 1
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cm or 10 cms? Is the weight of the schoolbus closer to 10 kgs or 10 kgs? Let the children come up with their
own questions for their classmates too.

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