Computational Estimation Journal Article

This article was in the Teaching Children Mathematics, October edition journal. It was written by Maria G Fun and Christine L. Latulippe. The article began by having the authors explain how much we use estimation in our daily lives without even thinking about it. We use estimation when we are driving and figure out if we need to stop for gas or if we can make it to the next stop. We use estimation when figuring out a tip at a restaurant and when shopping and figuring out which store has the best deal. In order for individuals to develop these estimation skills, teachers need to teach students. There are several types of estimation, and the article begins by explaining the main two. Reformulation, which is used for rounding, truncating numbers, and substituting compatible numbers. The other one is Translations; which is used for changing the mathematical structure. The authors continued on giving examples of each way of estimating and gave lots of lesson plan ideas for teaching estimation.

Some of the lesson plan ideas that the authors included were games where students had to quickly guess the total, kits with a missing numerator in the set of the problem and a missing denominator in the second set of the problem, and bringing in newspapers where the headings used exact or estimated numbers in the headings. The great things about all of these lessons is that they were easily adapted to the desired ability level. I really liked the lesson on the newspaper because it was applying what you were learning in the classroom and relating it to real life. This was great, because students like to know how this relates and why it is important.

This article was a nice article to read, and I thought it was great how the authors put in ideas for lessons, but I felt like it was almost common sense. There have been a ton of studies done on how estimation is vital, and it needs to be taught in the classroom. It is great that all of our cell phones have calculators in our phones to do the math, but we do need to know what numbers to plug in. I also think it is important to teach the students what the calculator is doing for us. I will definitely teach estimation in my classroom. Something that I need to remember is to relate the problems to my students. So if all of my students are into baseball cards, make the questions based off of buying baseball cards.