Estimation again!

So I'm back a day late, but.. better late than never, right?!

We began our lesson yesterday by reviewing what we had learned yesterday about estimation. We talked about reasonable and educated guesses again and THEN we got into the meat of the lesson...making REAL life estimations.

I started by pulling a handful of linking cubes out of our tub. I like to use something that they're familiar with handling that first time so that the estimate is more concrete to them. I pulled out 14 cubes with my hand and then we made some observations about my hand. We talked about the comparison of our hands. If we know that my {big} hand can pull out 14 cubes, then we can make what observations about our own hands?

My kids did SO well with their estimations. It is so important to take the time to explicitly teach reasonable and *educated* guesses...to take the time and make observations before you just allow your kids to give it a shot in the dark.  {I've done it before...the results were terrible!} My kids estimations were something like this:

Most of my kids pulled out somewhere from 5-10 cubes. Look how good their estimations were! So proud of them! Tomorrow we're going to be doing estimations with small and large marshmallows. I'll be back for more later!