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.