We have a jar of jelly beans in the classroom and the children were asked to estimate how many they think are in the jar. The children will be allowed to change their estimates over the next few days to see if their estimating skills have improved!
We then discussed some 'I wonder questions' such as...
I wonder how many books are the classroom?
I wonder how many pens are in the room?
I wonder how many chairs there are in the school?
I wonder how many children have ever been in our classroom?
We discussed that some of the answers we could find out easily whilst others were bit more difficult. Finally, we decided to investigate how many pockets are in the classroom. We started off by making estimates. Then we discussed our estimates in groups and gave reasons for our thinking.
'I think there are 64 because most people have two pockets and there are 32 children in the class,'
'I think there are 78 because some people have two pockets but some children have four or five.'
'I think there are 40 because some people have no pockets.'
Each group then counted the pockets for the children at their table and thought about whether this changed their estimates. We decided to include the adults to make it a bit more challenging!
How many pockets do you think we had? (answers at the bottom at this blog!)
Our final activity was to estimate a variety of objects found in and around school. The children were allowed to look but not touch and only had a few minutes at each table.
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| How many pens? How many sticky labels? (Not rolls but labels on each roll!) |
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| How many vehicles? |
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| How many paperclips? |
Some objects were easier to estimate than others. The children found the bigger objects easier to estimate and those that had fewer items.
There were some close estimates but quite a lot of surprises too!
Our class books were based on millions!
We saw pictures showing a million jelly beans and a million stars!
We also read lots of interesting facts about millions, billions and trillions!
What was your favourite fact?
Answers
There were...
101 pockets in the classroom
500 labels sticky labels
100 whiteboard pens
76 vehicles
and 1000 paperclips
Jelly beans to be revealed later in the week!
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