1. Importance of Estimating in Real Life
A lot of everyday maths is about estimating quantities and I will be talking about some strategies including Kinect that can be used to develop a sense of number considered a very basic arithmetic skill needed to estimate.
Forest Way Teaching Alliance 2nd October 2015

4. essential life skill
make judgements
can save time & money
uses mathematical knowledge & reasoning
enables us to check reasonableness of calculations .
‘front end’ estimates e.g = 900
provides fun & rich & maths activities
Do we give it enough importance ?

5. skills of estimating develop over time and practice
learners need to develop sense of number, physical quantity, & units of measure
need a comparison
need to understand context
challenges

6. Learning to estimate is dependent on the acquisition of very early arithmetic skills
To develop sense of number is to be able to enumerate small quantities then progress to finding out how many without counting each individual object.

7. c a b d e f

10. Small containers same width as the jars
Count items in small container – use multiples of 10
Point out the height of the items in the small container.  Then speculate “how high” the large jar is in comparison to the height you measured in the small container. 
Model the height of the small container using fingers. Learners do the same to ‘count’ height of the large jar, and then count in 10’s to get to the approximate answer.
Show that 3 and a half small containers stacked up would equal the height of the large jar so =35 would be approximately how many were in the jar.

11. Describe capacity using own words
Fill containers with liquid or objects to show capacity approx. half full, nearly full, nearly empty or use fractions
Calculate approx. quantity in containers using the approach in previous slide.

12. A giraffe is about 5m tall
Estimate the height of the bus.
Estimate height of young giraffe

15. 1 kg
49p £1 £1
medium
50p
60p
£3.50
£1. 35

16. Kinect
Use technology to provide engaging opportunities to practise estimation and support relationship between estimation and numbers by embodying the relationship in whole body movement along a a virtual number line.
Relationship between learner’s movements and number tracked and presented on screen by P. Choak’s specially designed program for Kinect.

17. a b c d e f

19. f

21. ‘Interactive investigation estimating different capacities in unusually shaped containers.  These widgets engage visual learners who may struggle with text-based or traditional teacher-led lessons.
For kinaesthetic learners, a range of open-ended investigations and problem-solving tasks link mathematics to the real world.’

22. References BBC Skillwise website Estimating & Rounding.
Nasen Special 3/12 An Educated Guess
Number Sense Series: Developing Early Number Sense –nrich.maths.org