Ordering journeys

Well done to everybody who solved this problem. We received a lot of solutions from children telling us what the answers are, but not many solutions where children explained their thinking.

Alfie and Lily from Oakthorpe Primary in the UK explained how they approached this activity, and also thought about any difficulties they found. Alfie said:

A good way of doing this is to do biggest to smallest because it's easy to do the first 6.

One of my difficulties I encountered is when I got to under 4 (thousand) because I had already done half so I kept looking at the ones I had already done.

Good point, Alfie - it can be difficult to keep track of which numbers you've already ordered. Lily said:

My first thought was looking at the 1 thousands and then working my way up.

My difficulty was Launceston because it tricked me and I thought it was 1 thousand.

Raphæl and Mubarak from Darell Primary and Nursery School in the UK used their knowledge of where the cities were in the world to help them:

We started by finding the European cities and ordered them first. Then we looked at the remaining ones by their hundred and thousand columns and ordered them. We think that Launceston was a trick because it might look like 1,742.

Good ideas! It sounds like a few children found Launceston the most difficult to order as that distance is much greater than the other distances. I wonder how we can make sure that we're comparing digits in the same place value column when we compare large numbers?