Common Core: Rounding

At our school, the K, 1, & 2 grades are deep into the Common Core Standards curriculum. Grades 3 & 4 will take The CCS on fully next year, but have been asked to incorporate lessons this year to get into how instruction will flow. Our 3rd grade team decided that Monday is our Common Core Day! This week, we worked on Rounding to the nearest ten.

To introduce/review this skill, we thought about roller coasters! Numbers on the upwards slope, roll back and on the downwards slope, roll forward. Here is my (non-artistic) drawing of that idea:

Then, we got into game time to practice our new skill! Our game came from Number Activities: Numbers and Operations in Base Ten resource from K-5 Math Resources, we used the Rounding Game to practice rounding the nearest tens place. The students are in partners and use playing cards Ace (1) through 9 to play this game. The deck is laid face down on the game board and each player chooses two cards at a time.

In the first picture above, Player One has drawn the number 16 and Player Two has drawn 77. The students then round their numbers to the nearest tens place. Player One rounds to 20 and Player Two rounds to 80. Player Two has won and gets to keep all four cards. If there is a tie, students take back their own two cards. Partners work through the entire deck and the player with the most cards at the end is the winner!

Another helpful resources for rounding is this Rounding Chart from Super Teacher Worksheets. It is members-only for download, but something that could be recreated easily: