Estimation Counts

Estimation is a great math skill that teachers need to make aware to their students.  Estimation is part of our everyday lives.  An estimation article from My Learning SpringBoard states the importance of estimating skills:
 1. “We want students to be able to determine the reasonableness of their answer.”

 2.  “We want students to be able to use mental math to more quickly arrive at a reasonable ballpark solution.”
 3. “We want students to use estimation beyond adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.  We also want students to be able to reasonably estimate time and distances.”

As a future educator, I am always on the search to make learning math fun and relatable to everyday life.  One activity that I would like to incorporate into my estimation unit is estimation jars.  These estimation jars would be filled with various items and students would have the chance to estimate how many items are in each jar.  This would be used as a fun attention getter to start out an estimation unit. 

When possible tying in literature into a math unit is beneficial.  I found a few estimation books at various levels each with their own focus that would be a good edition to an estimation unit.  Further digging or research may be helpful for making additions to this list.   

Rounding is an important skill that students need to be taught first before moving onto estimation.  Here is a fun rap to introduce rounding!