One way to introduce scientific notation, as an elementary math activity,
would be:
1) ask them for examples of very large numbers
2) ask for examples of very small numbers
3) challenge them to INVENT a way of shorten our representations
4) discuss their "inventions"
5) show how the "official notation", and our decimal system work together
6) talk about units, for example, 10 miles versus 1.609*10^8 cm
7) drill and practice
Starting with #7 is not enough. By the way, very small numbers can always
be shortened by getting read of zeros on the left side. But very large
numbers, such as 12300180045, can not be shorten without rounding.
OOPs, "getting rid" was not spelled correctly. Spell checkers are like
calculators.