Marshmallow snowballs

We read a story called The Mitten by Jan Brett. In the story a bunch of animals crawl into a lost mitten for warmth. The mitten buldges and stretches but Baba's knitting holds together. We made predictions about if we thought the mitten could hold any more animals and estimated how many we thought it would take to fill the mitten right up.  We also discussed why we thought this was fiction and different elements of the story. After we were done we used estimation skills to predict how many "snowballs" we could fit into our mittens...but not real snowballs... The kids knew they would melt and absorb making our mittens soggy. So we used fictional snowballs-mini marshmallows. First we lined up five marshmallows to use as a referent for our prediction. Then we counted by five and wrote our estimates down. After that the children filled the mitten being careful not to leave spaces. Finally they removed the marshmallows and grouped them into tens. They counted the actual amount, recorded it and compared their estimate to the actual number. Then they got to eat a few snowballs!