Winter Themed Lessons for Elementary Students: Cotton Snowman Estimation
With the arrival of winter comes the opportunity to use winter themed lesson plans. This cotton snowman activity is a fun way to see if your students have mastered estimation.
Materials: Large poster board, 100-200 cotton balls, glue, construction paper, markers and scraps of paper for estimates.
Prep work: construct a snowman out of cotton balls. Glue each cotton ball on the poster board. Then count up the number of cotton balls used and write it in a safe place. Decorate your snowman using markers and construction paper.
Lesson: Ask students what estimation means. I like to call it an educated guess or a rough calculation. Then, review times when it is good to use estimation. Finally, review strategies used for estimation. Explain to students that they will be estimating the number of cotton balls used to make snowman. Pass out scraps of paper and tell students they will have thirty seconds to make their estimate. When the papers have been passed out, reveal the snowman and use a watch or timer to keep track of the time. Signal to students when they have ten seconds left. Collect estimation papers. Next, discuss what strategies students used to find out how many cotton balls were on the snowman. Finally, announce the true number. You can choose to give away a small prize to the students who were closest to the actual number of cotton balls.
Extensions: You can also do an extension with mean, median and mode and even range with this lesson. Write down students estimation numbers. Find the smallest and largest numbers of the estimates. Write it on the board and have students find then range. Next, write all of the responses on the board and have students find the mean, median and mode.
Source: personal experience