October 2nd Class

During this class we were placed in groups, given a big piece of white paper and A LOT of sand. I couldn’t believe it when Mary said we had to try and count the grains of sand. I thought to myself..she must be mad…we will be here forever. Anyway, as crazy as I thought the activity was I found myself trying to find ways to count the sand. First we all decided to spread the sand out evenly, then place it into equal sections but we soon found out it was way to difficult to try and count itsy bitsy grains of sand in what seemed to be a small area. So then we decided we would dip our finger into the sand, count the sand grains that stuck on our finger and then see how many ‘finger’ amounts were in the pile. To my amazement we actually came up with an estimate number for the number of sand grains we had. After the whole class all had a discussion about our ways of counting the sand…we all had lots of different ideas and had tons of fun trying to count the sand grains. I think this would be a great activity for students because it a fun, usual, and hands-on way of teaching and learning math.