Week of November 14-18

Unfortunately, both of my daughters were sick this week, so I was only able to see my Monday and Tuesday classes. I was NOT happy about this!!! My 3rd graders have been learning about surface area. We have been using this new knowledge to figure out how many cans of frosting we would need in order to frost the top and 4 sides of 12 pieces of cake. We will continue to work on this next week.

In 4th grade, we continued to play probability games involving spinners and discussed what it means to be a fair game. Next, we will be using what we learned in this unit to design our own carnival games that are slightly unfair. After all, the carnival owners have to make some money! They can't have their customers winning all the time!

In 5th grade, we started to learn how to make our game images move by changing the input along the x and y axis. Next, we will learn how to prevent these images from flying off the screen never to return. We also began working on our own video games, applying all of the info we learned to fix a broken game and make it our own.

Week of October 31- November 4

This week the 3rd graders were asked to use their knowledge of liquid measurement to be smart consumers and decide which brands of lemonade the class should buy for their party. We learned that in order to compare the brands, we needed to calculate the cost per unit (or cup), and we realized that when you buy in bulk, the price usually goes down. We also started to talk about the volume of solids by building pieces of cake for our party out of connecting cubes. We realized that while area deals with the space inside a two-dimensional figure, volume is about how many cubes fit inside a 3-dimensional shape. In order to find the volume of the cake, we could count each cube, or we could multiply the lenght x width x height.
Watch this video for a reminder of how to calculate volume!

In 4th grade, we discussed what it means for a game to be fair. We realized that the theoretical probability of each player winning has to be equal in order for it to be a fair game. We then played a game involving spinners and learned that we needed to calculate the theoretical probability of each player winning in order to be sure if it is a fair game. Our experimental results varied from group to group and were not reliable.

In 5th grade, we are continuing to work on using the design recipe to write contracts, examples, and definitions of functions. We are learning about how variables are used in these functions and how programming is closely related to algebra. For example, students came up with a definition for a funtion called "average" that would take in two numbers (our variables) and calculate the average by adding them and dividing by two. We learned that each variable must have a unique name since it represents a different value.