Entertaining Estimation

Estimation is an important skill yet Connecticut students do poorly on this strand on the mastery test. I suspect one reason is since students have ready access to calculators, estimating skills are less important in their daily life. An accurate estimate provides feedback to students on how reasonable their answer is. Most students probably think estimation is just another skill to be tested so we need to put it into the proper context.

I did find some interactive estimation activities online to help students develop their skills in a game format. Glowla’s Estimation Contraption from CyberChase requires intermediate grade students to estimate answers when adding several numbers. Curious George’s Super Bouncy Blast Off is a game for primary grade students. Jan Brett has a Sea Shell Estimation Game on her wonderful web site — always a visual pleasure. (She also has some great movies on how to draw animals designed to be used with children.) For grades 3-12, students can use two estimation methods for measuring a treasure trunk of pearls in How Many Pearls.

CCSU Veterans History Project

Sunday’s Hartford Courant had a timely story about the Veterans History Project at Central Connecticut State University. The article highlighted how the project provided one man with information that lead to a meeting with his late father’s shipmate. Check out the full article. The Veteran’s History Project has videos of interviews with veterans and other resources.

Perhaps this article struck me since just last week the Railway Museum in Willimantic was vandalized. Seeing the swastika on the engine was very painful especially since many of the museum’s volunteers lived during World War II. The vandalism was caused by teens home from school due to local elections. Most teens have no connection or understanding of the times of WWII. At the personal level the article moved me since my mother’s family is Jewish and my 83 year old father is a veteran of the army and although he doesn’t talk about it much, it greatly affected him (and probably why he opposes the Iraq war).

I thought this would be a good learning opportunity for students. Information following the article states, “If you are a veteran interested in sharing your story, or would like to volunteer to conduct interviews, contact project director Eileen Hurst at 860-832-2976 or hursteim@ccsu.edu.”

Embedding html into Assignment Instructions

The neatest idea that I learned from the DE Virtual Conference from Oct. 24 was that you can embed html instructions into the assignments created for students. One example used Blabberize to provide engaging instructions recorded by the teacher.