Week of October 23-27

This week, the 3rd graders became movie studio executives. In this challenge, they must decide whether to work for Dreamworks or Disney Pixar. Before they make a decision, there are a lot of factors to consider. We started off looking at the critics' ratings for the five most recent movies from each studio. We discussed the importance of looking at a few reputable sites to find the ratings since people's tastes might vary. We learned what an average or mean is and how to calculate it. We then found three ratings for each movie and calculated the average. This will help us easily compare the ratings from each movie studio.

In 4th grade, we continued to find combinations using tree diagrams, lists, tables, and multiplication. Some classes used these strategies to explore the probability of the possible sums and products when rolling two dice. We conducted experiments to compare the experimental and theoretical probabilities and realized that some sums and products are more likely to occur than others. For example, you can get a sum of 7 in many ways, but you can only get a sum of two in one way.

The 5th graders learned that defining functions is an important skill in programming because it allows you to make things like triangles of all different sizes and colors or rectangles with different lengths and widths. We learned how to write a contract, examples, and definitions for functions and practiced inputting and evaluating them in wescheme.

Week of October 16-20

This week, the third graders completed and shared their Restaurant Owner and Dog Walker projects. It was amazing to see how much math was used in both of these careers. The restaurant owners learned that some meals will have a larger profit margin than others, and that the prices of each menu item have to seem reasonable to the customer. Our dog walker learned that he could make a good amount of money by walking five dogs at a time! Click on the links below to see the menus the students created!
Healthy Choices
Chinese Diner

4a continued to learn about how to use theoretical probability to make predictions about what should happen in a dice game. This allowed them to place their chips appropriately in order to increase their chances of winning the game.
4b learned some methods of solving problems involving combinations (think ice cream with various toppings). We discovered that tree diagrams help us organize our info so we can use it to answer questions involving probability. Some students were even able to figure out all of the combinations of heads and tails when flipping one coin four times in a row! Then they could find the probability of getting all heads or all tails.

In 5th grade, we started to use what we learned about defining variables to start to create our own video games with our own game images. We defined our target, danger, player, and background to be specific images related to our games. Next, we will define functions to get our game images moving!

Week of October 9-13

The third grader restaurant owners worked on creating menus and seating charts for their restaurants. When pricing the items on the menus, we discussed the importance of making a profit. After figuring out the cost to make each menu item, the students tripled or quadrupled that amount in order to make money and stay in business! The dog walker also had to figure out how much to charge per hour by calculating the distance each dog would be walked, how long it would take to walk the dog, and what a typical dog walker charges per hour.

In 4th grade, we discussed the difference between theoretical and experimental probabilities. Theoretical probability is determined by analyzing a situation and looking at the number of favorable outcomes over the number of possible outcomes. It never changes. Experimental probability can only be figured out AFTER an experiment has taken place. It is the number of favorable outcomes over the number of total trials. This fraction can change from one experiment to the next.
For some practice problems related to what we learned, click HERE.

In 5th grade, we learned how useful it is to define values using variables. It helps make our code much shorter and more efficient. The students even figured out how to define the string "Mrs. Emmich" to evaluate to a picture of me with my family!

Week of October 2-6

The third graders continued to discover new ways restaurant owners and dog walkers use math when running their businesses. Stay tuned for the finished products!


This week, the 4th graders explored unequally likely events. We conducted an experiment to find out how often students would get homework, and we realized that the teacher who designed the experiment was very smart because getting homework as an outcome was more likely than no homework! We also learned that according to the Law of Large Numbers, you have to do MANY trials for your experimental probability to get close to your theoretical probability. Check out a video that explains this below:

In 5th grade, we realized that when we write code, we can produce images, not just numbers. We did a lot of experimenting and discovered how to write the code for many different shapes of varying sizes and colors. We used math skills (properties of shapes, angles, problem solving) to help us understand the meaning behind the code we were writing.