estimation

i'm a pocket person but i'm picky about what i keep in them. a beach rock, lip balm, a token from a friend, a flash drive. bills, neatly tucked up in a colorful paperclip. but seldom do i carry coins. it's just too much jingle. so, like many others, i toss them in a container and there they sit until they fill the thing up. for a while now, i've transferred the contents to a bigger container as i fill the smaller one. finally this week, the little girl and i decided to take them to the change machine at the bank.

what a wonderful opportunity for a lesson in estimation, thought the teacher in me. so we brainstormed ways to go about doing that. we decided to start by counting the change in one fistful of money. then she counted the number of additional fistfuls from the container. pencil and paper multiplying that was a bit beyond her abilities came last. we estimated that there was roughly $125 in change.

on the way to the bank, the little girl reminded me that the counting machine wouldn't take foreign coins. we decided there had to be some in our stash since we live so close to Canada, but we weren't worried.

at the bank, we dumped all the coins into the machine. we watched in awe as the coins dropped in and the displayed total grew larger. as the noise started to slow and the display finally stopped, we looked at each other in disbelief. $124.69. and in the coin return, a single shiny Canadian quarter. i was so dumbstruck, i didn't even think to take a picture of it!

we were so close!!