Instructor Notes:

For materials preparations, click ‘Back to Main Menu’ button and select ‘Getting Started – EDC Setup’.

Read Every Day Counts Teacher’s Guide, Kanter and Gillespie, Great Source, 2005 or 2012 edition, p. 70.

By Day 66, third graders have had lots of practice using a variety of mental math strategies to determine the day’s sum. On Day 66, we’d hope someone would suggest using “front end addition” putting the 40 and 60 together to make a new hundred to end up with 22 hundred plus 11, or 2211. If children only suggest starting with the ones and regrouping from right to left, you may need to do more explicit modeling of mental math strategies in the coming weeks, if you want them to end the year with more tools than just the paper and pencil algorithm.

Now that our total amount is in the thousands each day, it is a good time to use it to practice expanded notation. Students can also use the day’s amount to practice rounding to the nearest ten, hundred, thousand, or ten thousand by using the concept of “halfway or more, round up” and if not, “stay where you are.” For example, $2,145 rounded to the nearest $100 remains $2100 and does not go up to $2200 because the 45 beyond $2100 is not halfway to the next hundred. On the other hand, when rounding to the nearest 10, $2,145 would not remain $2140 and would round up to $2150 because 5 is halfway to the next ten.