Estimating

Estimating

Estimating is an important strategy that we use more often in real life situations than precise calculations.

Over the next week and in the holidays look for opportunities to estimate quantities or totals. For our younger students they might estimate:

How many stairs in that staircase?

Total money in the coin section of a family members wallet.

How many books on a shelf?

How long until lunch?

Our older students might estimate:

The total of the grocery bill

The number of people living in their street

The sale price of a house

The duration of a trip or activity

Money in a full piggy bank

Build on the maths by asking students to prove or explain why their estimation is reasonable!

Happy Estimating!

Mrs Usher

Rich, Open Ended Mathematics - Design a city

Rich, Open Ended Mathematics  

The latest research on learning in Mathematics supports an approach which encourages students to solve problems in a variety of different ways, using a variety of different strategies.

In Year Three students were asked to design a city using a combination of parallel and perpendicular lines, a variety of angles and a ruler.  Here are some of their solutions!  

Feedback in Mathematics

Feedback in Mathematics - More than ticks and crosses

Not all that long ago all students worked on the same problems, making marking a page of sums a reasonably simple exercise.  Now in classroom visits you will see something different!

Teachers now focus on feedback that is focused, timely and based on

strategies for improvement. This takes priority over rows of ticks and crosses or having every piece of working out corrected.

While much of the feedback we give is verbal, written feedback can be seen in books also.

For students privacy we won’t be publishing samples this week, but some examples include:

“Fred was able to skip count by 5s starting at 10. Your goal now is to try starting at 11”

“Wilma, you have used a graph well to record your results.  Don’t forget to label each axis”

“Betty, can you solve this problem another way?”

“Barney, you have made a great x10 pattern, what would happen if you multiplied by 11, or 20?”

Teachers may also annotate students work, particularly in the younger grades to show what they can do.

BamBam can count a collection up to 39

or

When solving subtraction questions Pebbles used a counting up strategy.

Have some questions?  Bring them to one of our numeracy workshops!

Mrs Usher