Very large numbers in Year 6 Reading and writing large numbers is not easy! One of the real challenges for children in primary school is to be able to read and understand very large numbers. Even adults find this hard. Numbers such as 4567 can be read easily as the four can be recognised immediately as four thousand. However, with a number such as 12345678 it is not immediately clear what the value of the 1 digit is: is it a million, or ten million or what? The best way to read this is to quickly split the number into sets of three, starting from the units (right) as so: 12/345/678 And then read it as sets of hundreds, tens and units: HTU: 678 HTU of thousands: 345 thousand HTU of millions: 12 million So the number is 12 million, 345 thousand 678 (twelve million, three hundred and forty five thousand, six hundred and seventy eight. Calculators are a great way to help with this as they usually have some way of splitting the numbers into blocks of three, usually with a comma or apostrophe. We have just published a new set of worksheets on very large numbers and whilst it recommends using a calculator the answers still need to be written in words. Year 6 Number