Just How Many?

Each day we had kept track of how many items had been donated to the food drive by our children. We used ten frames to record the totals on a 'running ten frame' sheet. Today I cut out the individual ten frames and spread them on the carpet so the children could appreciate just how generous they had been!

I challenged them to think of strategies for how to easily calculate the sum of these ten frames without counting by ones.

One strategy suggested was to count the full ten frames by ten and then all the 'leftovers' by 1 and add the two groups together. We did that as a group and our total was 331.

Then another suggestion was made for groups of one hundred to be made using the ten frames because "counting by hundreds is faster than tens". We worked to organize the ten frames into the piles of one hundred and put the 'leftovers' in a separate pile.

 

Both strategies resulted in the total of 331 items donated by the children in our class towards the school food drive but we realized that counting by hundreds was much faster than tens in this situation!

Using this background knowledge I asked interested children to apply their learning to the real life situation of counting the total number of items donated by the entire school in the front entrance.

Some children decided to organize food in groups of tens and others used groups of twenty-five.

  

This activity took patience, persistence, and a solid number sense to complete.Way to go!