I see myself as being a teacher who is far more passionate about teaching Reading, rather than teaching Maths. I find it harder to differentiate Maths, despite the fact there is probably a much wider range of abilities in my Reading groups than my Maths groups.
That being said, this week I had a little win when teaching rounding to the nearest 10 and 100. It seemed to be much more difficult for them than I thought it would be, probably because I've come down from Year 5 to Year 3 and the concept seemed to come a lot easier to the Year 5s.
We had watched numerous YouTube clips (this one was a goodie thanks to NUMBEROCK!) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNfz-JU2cKE) and looked at all the usual poems for rounding, but some of the kiddies just weren't grasping it. They needed something a bit more visual.
Cue the numberline!
I love a good numberline because it has so many purposes. Having a good understanding of how to use a numberline to visualise their thinking, I think, is really important.
We started off with rounding to 10 and drew a numberline from 0 to 100, with intervals of 10. Rolling 2 ten-sided dice, we created a two digit number for us to work with.
Students then had to estimate where they thought their number would fit on the numberline and draw a line to represent it. Looking at that, they had to decide which multiple of 10 their number was closest to. In this case, the number they rolled was 83. They placed it on the numberline and worked out it was closer to 80 than it was to 90. This meant that they had to go down to 80 and realised that they were rounding down.
We repeated this a LOT before they seemed to be getting the hang of it and for those that felt ready, we experimented with rounding to 100, using the same idea.
This time, our numberline went from 0 to 1000 at intervals of 100. The same rule applied, except with 3 ten-sided dice this time, to create a three digit number. They placed the number on the numberline and decided whether it was closer to the multiple of 100 on the left or the right. I had the numberline for rounding to 1000 on the same page, but we didn't get around to using it just yet.
This is just one strategy that we have found worked for us! If you have another suggestion for something that worked for you, I'd love to hear it!