Estimation Station Revisited (and a Giveaway!)

I've been using an Estimation Station activity in my room for years. I always start it at Open House with the parents and then it becomes a weekly activity in our room. I posted about the specific way I do it with the kids with some free printables right around this time last year. You can visit that post {HERE}.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to review the Estimation Station from Educational Insights so of course, I jumped on it! As usual, I debuted the activity at Open House. I put the jar out with directions for the parents near the sign-in sheets and such and have parents make the first guess of the year.

The next morning, we have our first Estimation Jar activity of the year in class. We take all of the guesses and order them from least to greatest. This year we used Post-it notes and we lined them up on the wall. This worked a lot better than using the scrap paper squares like I did last year. As you can read about in my original post,  we do a lot more with the numbers as the year goes on, but for the first time we just concentrate on ordering the numbers.

Another difference this year is the way we counted the items. I used to have the previous week's winner help me count the items, but the new kit from Educational Insights comes with a small scoop. The scoop will fill the jar 8 times. So now we have some options, for example we can count the number of items in one scoop and multiply it by eight (or add 8 times). I decided to use the scoop to give each child a few marshmallows and then had each of them count their little pile. Then I pulled up this online calculator and had each child tell me their number as I added it on the calculator. Next week, I'll let the winner work the calculator on the Smartboard.

I liked this method much better than having the whole class watch one kid count, especially when the jar actually contained over 400 marshmallows!! I may vary my method depending on the contents of the jar. Either way, the closest guess gets to take the jar home to refill for Monday to start the whole thing over again.

I updated my parent letter to send home to include the cuteness that is my new Estimation Station!
Click {HERE} to download from GoogleDocs. Again, you can see my old post for the original form and some other ways that I used the Estimation Station jar in my class.

I'm loving the upgrade from my original Dollar Tree jar to this kit from Educational Insights! Along with the cuteness factor, it comes with the scoop I mentioned for teaching how to use a benchmark to estimate. It also comes with a teacher guide that has lots of practical ideas and information as well as their own parent letter explaining the purpose of the jar and ideas to fill it. The top part of the jar separates from the base, so you can only send home the top portion with the winner. It's washable, which may come in handy! So, how would you like this super cute new Estimation Station jar for your classroom? The generous folks at EI are ready to give one to a lucky blog reader. Just enter using the Rafflecopter widget below. Good Luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway