There are several pain points or areas of difficulty for students that are common with this concept. The first is an organizational problem. Students often will not line up the decimal points of the two values or they will write it so small that it is hard to stay on task. I would encourage students to rewrite these problems, if they are not comfortable with them. The second issue, that I come across often, is when two values are missing place values. For example: 1.42 + 1.2589. In this case, I would suggest that you encourage students to write all terminating zeroes. This problem would be re-written as 1.4200 + 1.2589. The last concern I would have is to make sure that students do not forget to write the decimal point in their final answer. Sounds simple, but I think this is the most common mistake. We approach decimal sums by first explaining them in fraction form. Many students often become confused about the hundredths place. They often think that it's the third column, not the second column, to the right of the decimal. Which almost makes sense when you think about it. If you can explain that there is no such thing as the "oneths" column, they start to understand it really quick.

This series of materials covers a wide range of problems and act as a solid review for students at all levels. I often find myself reviewing this section with students quite often. The worksheets below cover simple decimal addition and subtraction, converting decimals to fractions, and converting remainders back to decimals. Students will also learn how to convert these decimals into their equivalent fractions to solve the problem.