What to do with this activity?
Estimating is a great everyday skill, so it's good to practise it with your child. Estimating just means making a good guess based on a bit of knowledge or practice.
Encourage your child to estimate (guess) how long or high something is before you measure it; or how heavy something is before you weigh it. Also, when doing sums like adding or subtracting, get your child to make a rough estimate of the answer before they do the sum. Your child might be using a calculator some of the time, but it's important to have a rough idea of what the answer should be, or you can be very off the mark.
Here are some estimating games from Maths is fun where you guess the number of shapes as quickly as possible. Choose one of the easier games in the left hand column. Maths is Fun also explains the importance of estimating here. Here's a game for estimating length from Turtle Diary. And have a go at estimating which square to click on with the online game "Give a dog a bone" from Oswego.
The Irish National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has produced videos to show parents of first and second class helping their children with maths. Click on the yellow activity link below for an NCCA video on measuring and estimating a metre.
Everyday activities, like shopping and taking journeys provide a great opportunity for your child to practise maths skills by recognising patterns, counting out amounts, working out the best value, weighing and understanding money or understanding timetables and estimating your time of arrival!
Estimating is a very useful maths skill for everyday life – helping you decide if you have enough money to pay for a number of items or enough paint to paint a room. Encourage your child to estimate, for example, how many potatoes you will need for dinner or how much money to buy the shopping.
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