How to deal with big numbers?

First a big thank you to all of you who made it to parent nights over the last two weeks. I hope many of your questions were answered and you got a first glimpse of what this school year will look like.

Students are involved in so many learning activities already! I want to share what 3rd grade worked on when I visited yesterday. Students are learning about numbers up to 1000 and had brought bigger amounts of objects to class. They worked on sorting these objects in a way that would make estimating and counting easier. Here are a few models students came up with.

At the end of class students visited the stations to compare the various approaches. There is actually not one right way to do this activity and students engaged in discussions about why they chose a certain approach.
This activity is a good example for how we do math here at GSP. We believe that all students can be successful if we offer them a variety of entryways into a topic and allow them to experiment. 
Happy learning!