Common Sense Note
Parents need to know this book offers positive, common sense lessons that build math awareness and quantity recognition. Younger kids will enjoy looking at the pictures and doing the simpler lessons; older kids and adults will appreciate the harder challenges.
Families can work through this book together, talking about each page and the lesson it offers. What is an estimation? How does it differ from a real number? How can you train your mind and your eye to make a good guess when you are trying to figure out how many jelly beans are in the jar or elbows in a box of macaroni? Practice clumping or box counting. Which works best for you? Can you think of any other techniques that might help you make good estimations? Take what you know and apply it when you go on drives, walks, or to the supermarket. Make a point of always guessing before you count.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Patricia Tauzer
Learning to make strong guesses about numbers and quantities is just about the most important skill any mathematician can learn. But figuring out a number that makes sense can be overwhelming unless you know a few tricks. GREAT ESTIMATIONS by educational writer Bruce Goldstone is one book that helps take the mystery out of guessing. Readers will feel more comfortable estimating as they turn each vibrantly illustrated page and learn clever but simple techniques for coming up with answers that make sense.
Beginning with a cover jumbled with jelly beans, the reader is led through progressive lessons with a question, a statement, and a hint or two on each set of pages. Engaging examples that range from collections of toys, candies, coins, seeds, beans and fruit, bunnies, bugs, doll shoes, penguins and people in a pool present techniques for guessing that progress from the simple to the more and more difficult. And, before the reader knows it, making great estimations is a piece of cake.
It goes like this: Step one, get comfortable with the idea of making a guess. Step two, train your eye to remember what 10 looks like. Step three, get used to working with bigger numbers. Step four, learn to count in clumps. Step five, try boxing and counting. Step six, take what you know out into the real world: estimate the number of petals on a flower, people at an amusement park, hairs on the cat.
This common sense, clearly written book proves that math can be fun and offers entertaining, invaluable lessons that surely will make any reader feel more secure in the world of numbers.
From The Book
About how many people are in this pool?
Don't count -- estimate! An estimate is a good guess. Do you see more than three people? Fewer than 8,000,000?
Those are both estimates, but they are not very accurate. A great estimate is close to the real number. You can train your eyes and your mind to help you make really great estimations.
Plot Summary:
Beginning pages introduce the basic idea of making estimations and then offer increasingly difficult examples to train the eye to remember. The last part of the book teaches more advanced tricks of clump counting and boxing. Finally, the reader is challenged to look for and solve estimation puzzles wherever they go.
Related Books:
Other Books with a Math Theme:
100th Day Worries by Margery Cuyler
The Math Curse by Jon Scieska
Other Books by Bruce Goldstone:
Ten Friends
The Beastly Feast
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