The Importance of Bundling

Today we were tricked into learning!!  Mrs. Koehn said she needed to know if she had 1000 straws for a project.  She asked how we thought we could most efficiently count them.  It was suggested we bundle the straws by fives, and then it was suggested we bundle by tens.  We all agreed that bundling by tens would be faster to count than fives.

When we got all the straws bundled into groups of tens, we started to count them, but Mrs. Koehn kept losing her place and there were so many bundles...so we decided to bundle them again - this time into bundles of one hundred!

We used our habit of the week - SYNERGIZING - to work together and create our bundles.  When we finally had bundles of 100, we counted them again.  It went super fast!  We quickly found that we had more than 1000, (we actually had 1006!).  Mrs. Koehn was delighted.  Then she told us she had just tricked us into doing math without knowing we were doing math.  Sneaky teacher!

We thought about our bundling experience while we worked on math.  We were able to draw bundles of hundred, tens or single ones in order to solve math problems.  This made doing math so fast (and correct!)  We loved this strategy!