An activity that teaches a child about estimation.
Materials Needed:
- Building blocks.
- Large jug of water.
- Measuring cups.
- Egg timer.
- Marbles in a container.
What to do:
- Place the items onto the table in front of the child.
- Tell them they are going to learn “estimation”. This means coming up with a guess based on the following questions:
- How many blocks can you build to make a tower before they fall over?
- How many cups of water would you need to fill up the jug?
- How many marbles would you need to fill up a measuring cup?
- How many times do we have to turn the egg timer before you pack away the blocks?
- Will the marbles sink or float in the water?
- Go through the questions with the child.
- Ask them to think about their answer and write it down.
- Once they have answered all the questions, use the items on the table to work out the correct solution.
- See how close the child’s estimations were
Hints and Tips:
- As a group activity, you could make a chart with the above questions and write down each child's estimations. Add the results at the end to see who had the most correct estimations.
- You could use other questions than those listed above.
- Find more items that the child could use to estimate. For example: roll dice to find out how many times a number “4” would be rolled in 10 attempts.
