Counting Project Finale

Today we completed our big counting project! Throughout the last two weeks students practiced counting many different collections of objects exploring different ways to count and adapting their counting and recording strategies as they went along. This week we worked together as a whole class to decide how to count a collection of over 1,000 unifix cubes (see my previous post about this project)! Today we finished our project, by arriving at the final answer of, "just how many unifix cubes do we have in our classroom?" The answer turned out to be 1,744! Today during math we started with our groups of 100 (created yesterday) and counted them until we knew that we had 1,700. We have been discussing place value a little bit each day at the beginning of our math block when we find many ways to make "the number of the day," so, during a whole class discussion, we used what we know about place value to add the extra 4 groups of 10 and 4 single cubes left over from our previous days' counting to reach 1,744. Wow! The students were very excited to realize that, by using grouping and organizing, they were able to count to such large number of cubes! Below are two photos of our final result (the photo with the class shows, from left to right, a group of 1 thousand, a group of 7 hundreds, a group of 4 tens, and a group of 4 ones bagged by their quantity).