Immeasurable Fun At Highland Renaissance Academy

March 27, 2015

HEART tutor Eleanor Funderburg and her student at Highland Renaissance Academy got creative with the cubes recently while working on estimating and measuring with the Counting Notebook.

The goal for the student is to know more than just the rote memorization of the list of numbers. He needs to understand one-to-one correspondence, so he practices picking up one cube with each number. He learns that each number is represented by a group of cubes, and he determines what a numeral looks like in writing, on fingers, and in terms real objects.

In this activity, he practiced using estimation to guess how many cubes long an object would be. This exercise helps him to practice reasonableness (and basic counting!) as well as to know what a pile (or train) of 15 looks like versus a pile of five. He learns to count to “find out how many,” rather than just counting and saying the last number where he “lands”– he learns that that numbers represent quantities.

Want to try this at home? Ask your child to practice counting out a specific number of objects to see how many (i.e., “How many forks are on the table?”) and a specific group (i.e., “Make me a pile of 10 spoons”).