Counting All The Things (K-12) [video]

In this activity explore ways of counting large amounts of flowers, trees, birds, people, and more in spaces and places you go. While you’re out for a walk in the neighborhood or making a run to the grocery store take a picture of a crowded flower patch or bread aisle and discuss ways of counting how many flowers or loaves of bread there are. 

Print the picture, annotate it using any image editing software available to you, or upload it to Geogebra to use the grid lines and their other tools. Think about different ways of counting and representing your thinking visually. If you want to explore with algebra ask yourself questions like, if my bedroom floor was covered in flowers like this flower patch, how many flowers would it take? Consider modeling your thinking about questions like this using algebra and generalizing it for any space.

You can also find a version of this in Mathematical Mindset Book 4, How Crowded is the Crowd.