Guesstimation and Place Value

Present to your students the task of estimating how many objects are in any empty container you have. You can use any math manipulative for this activity, but I like to use snacks, such as these gummy frogs because it interests children. In my family, my youngest student guessed "21"; the middle student guessed "26" and the fourth student guessed "25."
Then ask one student to take the counters out of the container and put one on each small circle of a place value board. A place value board has 10 small circles in one section for the ones, ten larger circles for the tens. If you make the circles the same size as the bottom of a bathroom paper cup, you can use those to hold ten of any item you are counting. In the next section have circles large enough for a bowl or coffee can. This container needs to be large enough to hold ten of the bathroom cups, or 100 items per circle.
Once all the circles on the ones section are filled then have your student take them off the ones circles and put them in a bathroom cup and put the cup on the tens side.
For this example, the youngest filled the ones section twice and had three frogs left over. It was easy for them to see that there were 23 in the jar. This is a pleasurable way to learn estimating skills if you do this regularly with different counters and different containers of all sorts of shapes and sizes.








After you have done this several times, you can increase the amount of counters you are using as well. Initially their estimates will not be so accurate this time, as the numbers you work with are higher. Give your students chances to change their estimates as they go along because the object is for them to get better at estimating, not winning against each other. Once you have completed your estimating exercise and are ready to hand out the counters for a snack, first have them figure out the quickest and easiest way to divide the crackers equally.
For the benefit of the third and fourth students, I followed along with on the white board, writing down everything they did. In the end, the fifth said, "That sure is a lot of numbers!"


Sources:
GEMS: Frog Math: Predict, Ponder, Play
Kindergarten-3
6 Sessions
112 pages

In an artful interweaving of mathematics and literature, these activities jump off from one of the well-known “Frog and Toad” stories, “The Lost Button.” The story leads to free exploration of buttons, then sorting and classifying and a Guess the Sort game. Students design their own buttons and use a graphing grid to organize data. They also “guesstimate” the number of small plastic frogs in a jar and lima beans in a handful to develop the valuable life skill of estimating. A Frog Pond board game helps students develop strategic-thinking skills. The Hop to the Pond Game focuses on probability and statistics. In the revised guide, all grade levels play the fair version of Hop to the Pond with six frogs. Then grades 1-3 play the unfair version with 12 frogs.

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