Tech Tips Tuesday

What does 1000 look like?

In Maths over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to build a better picture for students about what 1000 looks like. My pre-service teacher worked with them to create a poster containing 1000 grains of rice, and that got me thinking about other ways we could see 1000. I went to Google images and Flickr, but for many of the results, I didn't feel I could be sure there were 1000. We discussed this as a class and tried counting items in the images and then estimating from our counts. We discussed how great it would be if there were pictures we could rely on to give us an image of 1000.

So, we split into small groups and students created a plan for how they could represent a collection of 1000 items. We wanted to think of easy and cheap ideas that would be achievable within a few lessons. Some suggestions included:

• dots
• sheets of paper
• paper clips
• pencils
• Pokemon cards
• rocks
• paper-chain links
• pieces of Lego

Students worked on the plan and then used the support of other class members to pull it all together. These Flickr images are the result of our work:

I've created a Flickr group so that other people can add their own collections of 1000 items. Why not try this with your class?