Estimating BIG numbers

I am just now catching up on posting - Yikes! It's been weeks. We have been SO busy but I'm ready to show what we have been up to. First, we have been learning to round greater numbers. We did a "cake walk" activity where we practiced rounding to the nearest 10 and then to the nearest 100. I don't have any pictures of that but here is the gist - Outside on the concrete, I marked numbers in a circle with sidewalk chalk. Then each student stood on a number. I played music and they walked around the circle. When the music stopped, they found a unoccupied number and stood on it. I called out a number like  " 83". Whoever was standing on 80 would come get a popsicle stick and then we would keep on playing. Whoever had the most popsicle sticks at the end got to go to the Treasure Box! They begged to play again and again  - was it because we were outside --hmmm - let me think??
         Next we tackled estimating LARGE numbers. I divided the class into 2 groups and I took one and my assistant took the other. Each student had a clipboard and recording sheet.After a discussion of how to train our brain to group in groups of 10 or 100, we went outside and estimated how many parking spaces were in the parking lot!

We also went to the auditorium to estimate the number of seats.

Then we went to the library to estimate the number of books on a shelf.

Even though we don't know the exact number of objects we estimated, I think they came pretty close using the methods we discussed!