Early Childhood Education (birth to eight) in Arizona

Lesson 7 Participation Assignment

Before you work on your assignment, please read this. The purpose of assignments in this course is for you to show your learning of the lesson content. Therefore, it is very important that you use the keywords and terms in your answers and that you refer to the important concepts from the lesson and the readings as you prepare your assignment. If you only write your own ideas in your answers, it will be difficult to assess your learning of the lesson content.

Read this Estimation Contest lesson. Use either of these.https://mypages.iit.edu/~smile/ma9108.html

1. How does this lesson help students understand the concept of an estimate instead of a guess? (I have attached more information)
2. How could you improve this lesson?(if you want to google this to see different types of lesson

Info you may need:

Invention Strategies Leading to Estimation

Most invented strategies that children use begin in the left-most position of the number; whereas, traditional algorithms have students begin on the right. These two methods also differ by being number- versus digit-oriented. The skill of estimating computation is often viewed as a difficult skill because students are familiar with starting with the right-most digit and not seeing the number as a whole (looking at the 9 in 299 instead of seeing the entire number 299). Therefore, students who have had many opportunities to invent their own strategies to solve problems find that the skill of estimation is easier to grasp.

Try It!

The learning opportunities in estimation that students are provided should be flexible activities and not rigid algorithms in the beginning. Flexibility with numbers contributes to understanding in computational fluency and computational estimation skills. Strategies discussed in the chapter are examples of flexible number activities. Read these activities and try several of them. How do these activities require you to be flexible in how you think about numbers?

Strategies for Computational Estimation

The skill of estimation comes into instruction after students have experience with mental computation and invented strategies. Some strategies require mental computation and manipulation of numbers. Your math instruction should include many different estimation strategies and incorporate the use of several types of manipulatives, such as 100s charts, base-ten models, or the ten-frames.

Along with the use of manipulatives in estimation instruction, you should find everyday life situations to estimate with. Many situations that you encounter on a day-to-day basis require not an exact answer, but an estimate. The words and phrases you use to describe this situation should include “about,” “just about,” and “a little less than,” which are all indicators that an exact answer is not called for. When presenting an estimation task, you will find that you need to lead students to strategies such as:

• Front-end addition and subtraction
• Front-end multiplication and division
• Rounding addition and subtraction
• Rounding multiplication and division