8 Fun Scientific Notation Activities

I want to share a set of scientific notation ordering cards I created to use as a sort of formative assessment to see what previous knowledge my students had about scientific notation and how they were progressing as we moved through our different notes and activities.

Scientifico was probably my favorite activity we did for practicing scientific notation. To play this game, you’ll need game boards for each pair of students, three dice for each pair of students, and a recording sheet for each student. I recommend laminating these game boards for durability.

Students must line the dominoes up so the numbers in standard form are matched with the appropriate number in scientific notation.

This scientific notation square puzzle was a great way to see how well my students could transition between the different representations.  It also helped me see if they understood how to tell if a number was smaller or bigger than another number.

One of the final tasks my physical science students did over scientific notation was this Giantburgers task from MARS. My physical science students found this task to be tricky because they really struggled to wrap their mind around what percent means.  I guess it’s a good thing their teacher has a math degree!

I created this scientific notation graphic organizer for my physical science students to glue in their interactive notebooks. I wanted to start class with a discussion of why scientific notation is useful and what it looks like.

I created this scientific notation foldable for my physical science students to glue in their interactive notebooks. The focus of this foldable is on converting to and from scientific notation.

To practice our scientific notation skills, we completed this scientific notation ranking task in our interactive notebooks. This problem is from the MARS Size It Up lesson.