In honor of National Library Week, our elementary librarian hosted a little contest. She gave all of the students and staff at our elementary school the opportunity to guess how many books were in the library.
I got the “privilege” of helping her count the votes.
Thank goodness I was able to look at votes in my pajamas!!
Here’s how she set it up. The jar below was pretty simple, but totally effective.
There was an example sheet for the students to see the expectations, and the librarian also gave the hint that our library had less than 1,000,000 books but more than 100.
Here are a few things we learned from this little contest.
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Children need to write more legibly.
2. Teachers need to work more on estimation skills. =)
3. Students should really follow directions and answer how many with a number!
4. Being cute and/or trying to bribe the counters does not work!
5. Fifth and sixth graders are not as funny as they think they are!
(Ok – I am laughing, but seriously??)
6. Some people really do take such fun contests seriously!! (Our school has 13,065 books.)
We had a teacher guess 12,165 and a student guess 13,000 – so we have two winners!
We had two separate parts to this contest. One was for the teachers and the other was for the students. The winners will each get a $5.00 gift certificate to a local book store. (Gotta promote reading after all!)
I hope you laughed at least a fraction as much as I did reading some of these responses. The librarian and I had a great time going through these, and when we worked together it really didn’t take too long!
The other plus that came out of this (aside from the 30 minutes of laughter) was that my librarian friend is going to “pay me” with ice cream sometime soon!! =) (It really doesn’t take much to make me happy!)
Is this a contest you could see your library doing? Or let me know what library events you’ve done in the past so I can pass them on to my amazing librarian friend!
Looking for FREE ideas you can use in the library with grades 1-8? Then you’ll love the editable options at this blog post! Type in what you want each group of kiddos to learn, and you’ll be all set! Grab them now!
Those are some creative estimates! I'll have to share this with my librarian. Thanks!
❀ Tammy
Forever in First
I hope she enjoys it! It was a fun activity to let the students do. I agree that the estimates are very "creative", but I've always found estimation to be the hardest math concept to teach. Thanks for the comment!
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Rebecca
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Sue
http://www.sos-supply.blogspot
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Charity
The Organized Classroom Blog