Sharing the Planet helping us Make Sense of 1000

Connected to our Sharing the Planet unit, we collect used bottle tops to show how much waste we use, but also to show what 1000 looks like. 

The visual of this created enough curiosity and excitement among my students that they asking them to count required no effort on my part.

First we used our estimation skills to think about how many we thought there would be. I love how estimation just creates enthusiasm and curiosity so naturally in maths. And as a teacher so easy to provide as provocations. 

We have talked about why we group so student decided that we should group in tens. To be honest I didn't think this would take long,  but it lasted nearly an hour. 

After grouping in tens, which we discussed makes it easier for us to count. We then set off to count how many bottle tops we had.

After watching a classmate start to count the very long line of tens, a problem arose when we started to deal with larger numbers.

Teacher Question? As numbers get larger what would make it easier to group in?

Students - "100's because it is easier to count and if you make a mistake then you don't have to go back and count from 10 again."

On this video clip you can see where we have grouped in 100s using the big chess pieces. We also then used a chair to make a group of 1000.

The visual that this provided to the students was amazing. They could easier see groupings in tens, then could then see groupings that 10 groups of ten made 100 and then that 10 groups of 100 made 1000.