Being mathematicians in year 1

The students in year 1 were set a challenge by one of their peers… “how many rubber bands are in this jar?”
First the students estimated how many rubber bands they thought were in the jar. Alexander said “estimating means guessing how many…without counting them.”
Mrs Sommers then posed the question, “how will we work this out?”
Some suggestions were:
• Counting by ones
• Counting by tens
• Working with a partner to count a small group and then add them together.
The students worked in small groups to count the rubber bands, using a variety of counting strategies:
• “I counted by tens” Noah
• “I counted on” Alfie
• “I counted by ones” Flynn
• “We split the group and then counted” Grace
Their numbers were recorded by Oliver D, who then used the calculator to add up the total… and find out who had the closest estimation, which was Lauryn. The total number of rubber bands in the jar was 1247.
The students demonstrated skills of persistence and co-operation to collectively solve this mathematical problem. They are keen to solve more ‘big number’ problems!