Estimating is something that we use all throughout our life. Whether this is estimating how much our shopping trip is going to cost, how much flour to add to a recipe or how much time it will take us to clean our room. Help kids practice estimation with goldfish with this super fun, free printable math activity.

Kindergarten Math

• Acorn Cut & Paste Addition Worksheets
• Addition Mini Book (Adding 0-12)
• Color Coins Money Worksheets
• Counting Apple Mini Book: 1-10
• Deck of Cards: Addition
• Duplo Number Mats 
• Free Fall Color by Number
• Printable Fall Number Mats 
• Fall Number Worksheets
• Farm Bingo Marker Number Practice
• Hungry Caterpillars Number Book
• Shape Worksheets
• Fun Telling Time Mazes
• Telling Time Tic-Tac-Toe

Goldfish Estimating Numbers

This activity is incredibly simple, versatile and FUN! My daughter asked for this over and over and in multiple ways. Even when we had cleaned up, she asked me to print another page for her to do on her own. I love when she enjoys activities that are teaching her something!

The first step is to print out the Estimation and Counting Recording Sheet. This is just going to help kids see the difference between the amount they estimated and the actual amount.

You’ll need a group of objects to play. We used fish crackers at first and then after we used coins. You can use anything you’d like, as long as you have quite a few of the same thing.

I grabbed a handful of fish crackers and held it in my hand. I asked my daughter to guess how many crackers I was holding. The number that she said, we wrote in the estimation column on the recording sheet. Then I dumped out my hand and she counted the crackers. This is the actual number and we wrote that under the count column.

We did this a few times with the crackers.

THEN…

She grabbed our coin bucket. I thought that she wanted to do how many coins were in the pile. On the contrary, she wanted to step it up even more. She grabbed a handful of coins and asked me to guess how much money she was holding. This was interesting for sure. Some we got close while others we were way off.

The next round we held the coins in our hand without looking at the coins. So this estimation was solely based on weight and if we could feel the difference of coins in our hand. This was difficult with a whole handful of coins.

We both had so much fun with this activity. It was a proud moment to see my daughter so involved in an activity that she was learning from!