Video Transcript
Compare these numbers. Nine, three, and eight. The smallest number is what? The greatest number is what? Order the numbers from smallest to
greatest.
In this question, we’re being asked
to compare three numbers together. They’re the numbers nine, three,
and eight. We know that we need to compare the
numbers together because we’re asked to find the smallest number. And then, we’re asked to find the
greatest number. To help us find which number is the
smallest, let’s model each of our three numbers. Perhaps, we could use cubes. Let’s start with the number
nine. One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, a tower of nine counters. Our second number is three. One, two, three. This tower isn’t as tall as the
first one, isn’t it? Our third number that we need to
compare is the number eight. One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight.
Now, by modeling numbers like this,
it’s going to help us to compare them. Our first sentence says the
smallest number is what? Which of our three towers of cubes
is the smallest? Well, we can see that our tower of
three cubes is a lot smaller than number nine and eight. This means we can say the smallest
number is three. Now, which of our three numbers is
the greatest? The word greatest is another way of
saying largest. Which of our three numbers is more
than the other two? Well, again, if we look at our
towers of cubes, we can see that our tower of nine cubes is the tallest. This must mean it contained most
cubes. The greatest of our three numbers
is the number nine.
Now that we’ve compared our numbers
and we know what the smallest and the greatest numbers are, we can order them from
smallest to greatest. We said the smallest number was the
number three. The greatest number was the number
nine. And this means that the number
eight must be in the middle. We know this is true because if we
put our towers of cubes in this order, we can see that they now go up in size from
the shortest to the tallest. Out of the numbers nine, three, and
eight, we found that the smallest number is three. The greatest number is nine. And in order from smallest to
greatest, the numbers are three, eight, and nine.