We recapped what estimating is...

- Estimating is not counting. It is a sensible/clever/good guess at how many there are of something.

The children were shown some seeds and had to say which one had 14, our number of the week. They were shown them very quickly, so they did not have time to count them. They had to estimate.

Which one has 14? The children were asked to explain their reasoning.

Now we know what 14 looks like, we estimated some other amounts of seeds. The children were asked if there were more or less than 14? They were encouraged to use their subitising skills to help them or if they could see any patterns, to help them make a clever guess?

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We watched the Scratch Garden estimating video - Estimating! | Mini Math Movies | Scratch Garden - YouTube

The children were shown a small plant pot and were asked to guess how many sunflower seeds were inside by listening to them when they were given a shake!

‘I wonder how many seeds are in the pot? Are there zero? Why not? There must be more than 1, 1 seed wouldn’t make that much noise!’ The children were asked to listen again and recorded how many seeds they thought there were inside. Together we then lined the seeds up to count them. The children evaluated their estimations to explain if their guesses were good/ sensible or not. We repeated the activity with different amounts of seeds.