What are decimal expansions?

A decimal expansion is like a special way to write numbers using parts of a whole, just like you might divide up a pizza or a chocolate bar.

Imagine you have a big chocolate bar and you want to share it with your friends. If there are 10 friends, each gets 1/10 of the bar, that’s 0.1 in decimal form. If you have 25 cents, that's like having 0.25 dollars. Decimal expansions help us show how much we have when we split things into tenths, hundredths, and even smaller parts.

Think of a number line from 0 to 1. A decimal expansion is like counting steps between those numbers, each step is a part of the whole.

• 0.5 is halfway, like one slice out of two.
• 0.25 is like one slice out of four.
• 0.125 is like one slice out of eight.

These decimals are just different ways to express fractions in everyday life, whether you're splitting candy or measuring how much juice is left in a bottle.