Write 3,650 on the IWB and give five seconds of quiet think-time before any hands go up. Take two or three hands-up answers — listen for whether pupils naturally say "three thousand" first, then the rest. Revoice a strong answer: so we start with the biggest chunk, the thousands, and work down.

Walk each example aloud, one at a time, and link the spoken chunk to its column.

• 2,134 — a full number with no empty columns; point to each column as you say its chunk.
• 5,008 — pause here. Ask why don't we say a hundreds word? The zeros in hundreds and tens warn us the columns are empty. This is the key idea of the lesson.
• 6,400 — the empty columns are at the end this time; the words simply stop after "four hundred".

This round is for talking it through together — pupils take turns at the board and the class agrees or corrects out loud.

Read each number slowly in words and let an individual pupil build it in the columns. Rotate four pupils. Good numbers to read aloud: three thousand, two hundred and forty (3,240); seven thousand and five (7,005, an empty-columns warning); four thousand, six hundred (4,600); nine thousand and ninety (9,090). After each build, have the whole class read the number back in unison to keep the watching pupils with you, then ask: which chunk did you NOT hear, and what does that tell us? Revoice: no hundred word means a zero in the hundreds column.

This round is the practice bank — call one pupil up per number, the class checks aloud, and confirm before moving on. Keep the board work brisk rather than over-explaining.

For each target, ask the narrating question: which words tell you a column is empty? 1,205 has no tens word; 3,090 has no hundreds or units word; 7,016 has no hundreds word; 9,400 has no tens or units word. Use the Check button as part of the narration — yes, that's it — when a pupil lands the number.

Recap the empty-column idea once more as the headline takeaway. This lesson sets up partitioning and renaming, which comes next.