Estimation

Strategies

Hands on experiences are the most memorable for students. In each lesson, I will start with an exploration activity that relates to the skills or concepts as a motivation activity. Explorations and investigations allows for students to make discoveries of the new math knowledge. In many of the investigations, having students come up with a working plan will encourage them to be active participants and thinkers. In this unit, many of the activities require students to synthesize their prior knowledge of different math areas. Students may discover the mass of rice can be related to area problems and that powers of ten can be used in area and volume calculations.

Students will solve three general types of problems in this unit:

1. Given a demographic location, find the population and use that figure to find the mass of rice needed to feed the people, that is, make them one zong each.
2. Given an amount of rice in weight, find the volume and dimensions of a storage container to hold that the amount.
3. Given an amount of rice in weight, find the area of land to produce this rice.

Problem solving is usually not a one step exercise. Students need to utilize many skills: they need to understand the problem, identify the relevant facts, know what is missing, devise a plan, recall or research information, etc. in order to find a solution. Also, finding the correct calculation does not end the process. They need to organize the information and share it with the class.

In each lesson, we will define the specific situations for each of the general questions above. The lessons will include direct teaching using the zong cooking lesson to demonstrate the process and core contents. We will practice the steps and skills with the U.S. populations through guided practice. Students can practice the skills further by choosing a different country to do estimations. We start with the more concrete and tangible situation of the zong cooking lesson related problems and move onto more abstract situations of the U.S. population. I want students to see that the strategies and steps are the same, even though the numbers or situations may be more complicated. They can apply the strategies of the simpler situations to more complex situations by breaking down the problems to smaller problems.

One of the key focuses in my school district to improve teaching is to differentiate instructions to meet the needs of all students. Through investigations and explorations, I will challenge more advance students with complex problems and break down the problems even further for basic students. This unit provides a variety of activities that will meet students where they are. There are also many extension possibilities relating to the topic of the unit.

The cumulative project at the end of the unit can serve as an assessment for the unit. This is an open-ended project where students can revisit and demonstrate the skills they have learned in the unit.