Step 3 - working with the real money.

After the students had mastered sorting, organizing, and counting the plastic money we took out the real money and used our skills to count the coins.

Here are the students working together to sort the money:

Then they organized the money and collected the data on their sorting sheet.

Step 2 - Organizing the money

The students found  it difficult to  record the number in coins. Some groups suggested lining up the coins or stacking the coins to help.  Suggestions were to stack the coins in groups of 2 or 5 because those were 'easy' numbers to count by.

Step 1 - Counting the Terry Fox money

The students decided that the first step would be to sort the money - put all the same coins together.

Estimation

After the students had collected the Terry Fox donation, they wondered how much money was collected in total.  They thought it wild be important to accurately know the amount so that we could tell:

 - the Terry Fox Foundation

 - the researchers at the the hospital

 - BC Cancer Agency

 - the students and staff at DLG

We decided to estimate how much money was in the jar before we counted it.  Some suggestions from the students for estimating were:

- what you know about money

- look at the bills

- look a close look at the container

Some students noticed that there was a cheque on the jar and wondered how much the cheque was written for.  After deciding that it would be important to know the value of the cheque I showed them the amount.   The students then decided that knowing the amount of the cheque would change their estimates.  We then made a second estimate. 

Here are our estimates:

Terry Fox

The students of Division 9 were responsible for the coordination and collection of the Terry Fox donations.  

The students wrote speeches about Terry Fox, the Terry Fox run and why they were collecting donations. They then presented their speeches to classes in DLG.

Here are some samples of their speeches: