Scaleville Daily Starters

Scaleville is a set of daily class starters. Used regularly, students will gain a sense of number. You will build
fundamental skills in estimation, an understanding of measure and a physical connection to scale. How much does
a racing bike weigh? How fast does it go? How fast does a baby crawl? How tall is a giraffe? How tall are you?
How much, how far, how fast, how much…

Scale and Estimation
Does This Talk About Size and Scale and Reasonable Answers Sound Familiar?
Teacher: Do you think this answer is “reasonable”? Your calculation says that loading 2 adult male elephants onto a
plane will add 682.7 pounds.

Scaleville Viewpoint
Student: Oh, that doesn’t make sense, does it? If two elephants weigh about 700 pounds, then each would only be
around 350 pounds. A heavy weight wrestler or football lineman weighs about 300 pounds and an adult elephant
weighs a lot more than those. Maybe I have the decimal in the wrong place.
Every student should be able to engage in a discussion like this. Recognizing an unreasonable answer is dif􀃩cult
unless one knows how much things weigh, how fast they move, how much area they cover. Students only need a
few mental landmarks to enable them to estimate to the nearest power of ten. Will the answer be closer to 20,
200, 2,000 or 20,000? As estimation skills improve, reasonableness becomes a meaningful concept.