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Content Area: Math
Index: 4.2E Grade 6 CPI 5
Standard: 4.2 - Geometry and Measurement
Strand: E - Measuring Geometric Objects
Cumulative Progress Indicator: 5 - The student will develop informal ways of approximating the measures of familiar objects (e.g., use a grid to approximate the area of the bottom of one’s foot).
Grade: 6
Sample Activities:
· Students develop the concept of a billion by estimating its size relative to one hundred thousand, one million, and so on. For instance, they explore questions like If a calculator is programmed to repeatedly add 1 to the previous display and it takes about forty hours to reach a million, how long would it take to reach a billion? Students might relate this to the size of the national debt (now $5 trillion).
· Students estimate the area inside a closed curve in square centimeters and then check the estimate with centimeter graph or grid paper.
· After reading Shel Silverstein's poem "How Many, How Much" and Tom Parker's Rules of Thumb, students write their own rules of thumb (e.g., You should never have homework higher than one inch.).
· Students make estimates about things that happen in one day at school after reading about some of the data in In One Day, by Tom Parker. For example, they estimate: How much pizza is eaten? How much milk is drunk? How many students go home sick? or How many students forget something? They then interview people around the school or conduct a survey to check their estimates.
· Students make use of strategies like clustering and compatible numbers in estimating the results of computations. They recognize that a sum of numbers that are approximately the same, such as 37, 39, and 42, can be replaced in an estimate by the product 3 x 40 (clustering). They also know that other computations can be performed easily by changing the numbers to numbers that are closely related to each other, such as changing 468 divided by 9 to 450 divided by 9 (compatible numbers).
· Students work through the Mathematics at Work lesson that is described in the Introduction to this Framework. A parent discusses a problem which her company faces regularly: to determine how large an air conditioner is needed for a particular room. To solve this problem, the company has to estimate the size of the room.
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