Estimation and Rounding

In unit one of 4th grade math one thing we focus on is reasonableness in problem solving.  This week, to help students understand how to judge the reasonableness of an answer we are working on estimation and rounding.
Yesterday we created this anchor chart in class

Then students worked in groups to create posters of examples of using estimation in the real world.  One of my goals for this year is that students see math in the world around them and understand its usefulness.

Here are the posters some of the groups created.  (IRL = in real life)

Then we took a gallery walk around the room to see what the other groups wrote about.  Each group rotated together and discussed each poster when they arrived there.  After all of the groups had a chance to look at each poster, we had an intelligent conversation (no raising hands) about what we saw, we discussed similarities and differences in their ideas.

Today,we reviewed our work from yesterday by completing our first Frayer Card in our math glossary.

Then we built on our learning from yesterday and took some rounding notes and did a few rounding problems after we took notes. We discussed two ways to round.  1: Thinking about a number line and which number is the number in question closest to. 2: A rounding chant with the "rules" of rounding. Here are the notes for today.

Finally we wrote our first blog post today in Kidblog.  It was a simple four sentence post, but the kids were so excited to be on the laptops!