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Welcome to my math blog! The purpose of this blog is to help you stay informed about our learning and experiences that have taken place during our math class. I have also included links your child (and you) may want to use in order to supplement math learning in 5th grade.

Friday, February 12, 2016

I Love Math: Valentine's Activities


Today, our focus was problems involving Valentine's Day.  It began in my tutorials, as I asked the students to solve this problem, which I found on Teacher Vision:


To make this a little more interesting, we created the "box" (without a lid) using 1/2" grid paper.  This allowed me to talk to my students about nets.  Once we had created our net (without the lid) we found the area of each side of the box, allowing me to discuss surface area.  We used the inside base of the rectangular prism to help us determine the surface area of the missing lid.  Once we had our measurements, we were able to determine if Philip had enough construction paper to cover the box.

In math class, we spent our time solving a variety of problems.  We began with an estimation 180.



From there we solved a Would You Rather?


First, I had my classes answer the question based on their prior knowledge.  Then, I handed each student a fake dollar and a fake quarter.  They traced around the dollar and then trace the quarters.  When they had determined the amount of money this would get them, I handed them a box of candy hearts.  I asked them to take out one and use it as their tracer to determine the amount of money this method would give them.  When they had the two amounts, they had to tell me, in writing, if their prediction was correct or incorrect and back up their answer using their data.


Next, I wanted to see if our class had the same number of candies in their box as Mr. Stadel in his estimation180.  So my students counted the candies in their box (including their tracer) and we placed them on a spreadsheet.  When it was complete, I used the function SUM to add up the candies in the class and then the AVERAGE function.  We decided that this meant the number of candies that should have been in each box.  When I asked them why some had more and some had less, we determined that the packaging was based on weight.  Now we wondered why our class average did not match Mr. Stadel's number of candies.  We looked at our boxes and noted that our weight was .9 oz, when we compared to Mr. Stadel, we noted that the weight on his box was 1 oz.....

This led to a brief discussion on the deceptive packaging.  The size of the box had not diminished, and the price of the box of candy had not changed, but the weight (ergo the amount) had!  Sneaky!  Of course, as a consumer, I should have paid more attention to this myself!

To finish off the day, we completed a mystery picture using coordinate graphing that I found on Teachers Pay Teachers.

  





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