Rounding Numbers

We're in the middle of a mini-math unit on rounding numbers. The boys and girls are having fun aboard my monster truck school bus (a regular bus just wasn't "cool" enough for us).  

We're learning that if the bus stops in front of house number 100 and 200, we have to figure out where to get off if your house is #120, #150, or #190. We're having a lot of fun with this mini-unit and I'm really pleased to see that most students can easily round to the nearest ten and with a little more experience, we'll be able to round to the nearest hundred in no time (we just learned about rounding to the nearest 100 today).

The boys and girls are learning that when rounding to the nearest ten, we look at the ones digit and when rounding to the nearest hundred, we look at the tens digit.  You can see how essential it is that the kids know their place value chart.  

If you're looking to take it up a notch and promote some higher level thinking, I like to ask the kids to, "Name a number that rounds to X"  and it certainly gets the wheels turning! Sure, it's easy to tell you that 13 rounds down to 10, but when you ask a child to tell you some numbers that will round to, for example, 90, that is a much richer, more multi-layered (is that even a word?) exercise.  

Check out our cool monster truck. It can't carry the whole class at once and it doesn't always start up the first time, oh, and the stereo doesn't work, but we can do something most cars can't: we can make our own roads.  

vroom-vroom!