Counting the Champ Bands!

Students in our school have been earning Champ Bands for following the school rules (be safe, be kind, do your best) and adding them to their class bins then the whole school bins to work toward celebrations of our achievement (see previous posts about PBIS).

After we filled the three whole school bins for the first time and had a whole school celebration (eating a picnic lunch on the playground) we all wondered just how many bands we had collected all together. We decided to figure out how many bands it took to fill those containers! First graders have been reviewing counting strategies this fall and we decided to take on this counting task. Miss Ransom's class and our class got together and counted the huge number of Champ Bands that it had taken to fill one of the whole school bins.

Our classes have been reviewing grouping items to count them and we decided that we are all good at counting by 10. We have learned that 10 groups of 10 make 100 so students worked together with table groups to make 10 groups of 10 bands then put them into a ziplock bag to make groups of 100. We ended up with so many 100s that when we started counting them we realized that 10 groups of 100 makes 1,000! We used large shopping bags to make groups of 1,000 and when everything was grouped into collections of 1,000, 100, 10, or 1 we got together as a large group to count our final number. We ended up 4,163 Champ Bands! The kids were so excited about working together on this project and they were so proud to be able to count so high using their grouping strategies!

There are 3 bins that get filled with bands from all classrooms before we have a whole school celebration and if just one of those holds 4,163 bands you can see just how much hard work the kids at UMS have been doing to follow the school rules this fall (our first celebration was in September and we are on track to have another one this month)!

Here are some photos of us counting the bands!