The Twelve Days of Christmas Costs WHAT?!?!

Bell Ringer:  AIMS Education Foundation

This is the second of the two logic problems that I found on my Google Drive.  I have no idea where it came from, but its copyright is also 1989.

Lesson Frame:

Lesson:

Today wasn't just about finding the total cost of the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," I also wanted to introduce my students to some "shortcuts" that can be found in Sheets and other Google products.

To begin, I assigned the spreadsheet I wanted the kids to use through Google Classroom and chose the option of making a copy for each student.  Now, when students opened this up in Google Classroom, they could work on a sheet just their own.

There were no formulas imbedded in the spreadsheet, as I wanted to keep the numbers a surprise.  We assumed that the song built upon itself, so technically, "my true love" received 12 partridges in a pear tree total.  So we added 12 to "days given" and then multiplied 1 x 12 to find the total number of gifts given through the song (12).  Then we visited the Christmas Price Index to find this year's costs:  

Once we found the cost of the partridge in the pear tree, we added this information to our spreadsheet, then used the Google calculator to find our total cost (multiply by 12).  During this time, I was also showing students how to center the information for a more pleasing aesthetic.

We continued this process through each of the "gifts".  Believe me, there was loads of discussion about "my true love" and why he purchased these types of items (seriously, have you thought about all of the birds?!?), and why on earth he would pay so much (check out the cost of swans!).

Once we had all of the information, I taught them how to shrink the page (control -) in order to see the entire document making the next step much easier.  Next I showed them how to quickly add a column of numbers in a spreadsheet (Insert, Formula, Sum).  We began with the column of gifts and discovered that she received a total of 364 gifts.  Now, I posed the question, "Suppose she needs to politely give away these gifts and begins to give away one each day starting the day after Christmas.  What day would she have finally given away the last gift?

Next, we added up the cost column to find the total cost of all of the gifts, again we used the shortcut (Insert, Formula, SUM).  At this point (after the hysteria of the amount), I showed them how to reset their page to its original size (CTRL 0).

Close

After we finished up with some final thoughts and I showed them how to "turn in" a page in Google Classroom, I asked them to answer a student feedback survey about the activity.

I found this Student Feedback Survey on Edutopia and used it as a guide to create a survey on Google Forms.  This is the first time I have used this type of survey and am very interested to see how it goes!

Assignment:  Countdown to STAAR 5.1.1

I am moving from the Fifth Grade Builders to Countdown to STAAR, primarily because (while both cover TEKS) Countdown covers the TEKS using word problems.  I feel like my students need exposure and time to learn how to work with word problems.