Week of September 25-29

This week, some 3rd graders took on the role of restaurant owner and are using all kinds of math to figure out how much it will cost to make each dish and how much to charge customers in order to make a profit. We are also learning about fractions and measurements, like how many liquid ounces are in a cup, how many ounces are in a pound, how to calculate the cost of 3/4 sugar if we only know the price of a whole cup, and much more! Other students became dog walkers and are using google maps and elapsed time skills to plan out the schedule of when the dogs will be picked up and dropped off. They are also thinking about how much to charge each dog owner in order to make it worth their while. The students are realizing how much math goes into careers that might seem totally unrelated to math!

These students are planning out the meals for their restaurant!

In 4th grade, we've been learning about equally likely events by conducting experiments like flipping a coin or picking a colored cube out of a bag. When tossing a coin, the probability of getting heads or tails is 1/2, but we realized that not all events that are equally likely have a 50-50 chance of happening. If there are 8 different colored cubes in a bag, each chip has a 1/8 chance of being selected. The students came to realize that equally likely events have the same chance or probability of occuring, not necessarily a 50-50 chance!

These students are finding the experimental probability of choosing each of the eight colored cubes in the bag.

The 5th graders are becoming computer programmers and have already started writing code to evaluate mathematical expressions and to produce images. After learning how to write code to produce a star, students were able to figure out on their own how to create many other shapes like triangles, circles, squares, ellipses, right triangles, and many more! This led to a lot of meaningful discussions about how the coordinates of the screen can help us size our images and what the numbers we are using actually mean. The students discovered that the rectangle's numbers represent the lenght on the x and y axis and the circle's number represents the radius.

Students are writing code to produce various shapes.