FREEBIE and a SALE!

After the terrible week I've been having with 'other' teacher work, I walked into class yesterday and I had the most GLORIOUS,  PERFECT, PRODUCTIVE day! OH. MY. WORD. I could not fault any of my kiddos on their behaviour, manners, work ethic, anything! I must admit, that for the last couple of days they have been a bit chatty, easily off task and a couple have been dobbing on others for teeny, tiny things which drives me up the wall! But yesterday was like a day made in heaven! We had so much work to do and we got it all done. This included a math chance investigation using dice, counters, coins and cards and a design, make appraise project using wool, paper, plastic bags and tape. Did I once have to remind them to keep the noise down? NO! Stop being silly with the materials? NO!! Get back to work? NO!!! They were absolutely perfect! I could not believe how quiet and productive they were all day. 

They've put me in such a good mood, I'm having a sale at my Teachers Notebook and TpT store (well, that's the excuse I'm using. I actually realised I hadn't had one since August which I think is a bit unfair since I love sales and bargains myself!). So for 3 days, you can get 15% off everything!

Anyway, I've just been blurring out pictures of my kiddos faces so that I can show you some of their designs, but knowing my school, I'd still get into trouble if they saw it, so no pics. I should really remember to get pics without any kids in them.

So here is an activity I did last week with chance. Each student got this sheet and 2 dice. They predicted which sum they would roll the most (when adding the totals rolled on both dice) and then continued to roll until one sum reached the top. 

 

As a class, we kept a tally and made a graph using post-it notes to show which sum each of them had reach the top first. They were surprised to find that 7 reached the top first the most.  They then met in groups of 2-3 to look closely at each others results to try to explain why 7 was more likely to be rolled than the other numbers. I had to nudge some of them to look at the number sentences they recorded. They wrote in their Thinking Journals their explanations and then we came back together as a class and discussed our thoughts. They had realised that no-one rolled a 1 because it was impossible to roll a sum of 1 using two 1-6 sided dice. They also realised and were shocked that 12 (being the biggest number) wasn't rolled that often until they realised they can only roll it one way - a double 6. They ended up concluding that 7 had the best chance of being rolled because we could roll it more ways. We ended up recording how we could roll each sum and talked about which numbers were impossible, likely and unlikely to be rolled. They could identify out of 2-3 numbers which had the best chance, even/50:50 chance and no chance of being rolled.

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Week in Review - Probability

Wow, the first week back after our two weeks holidays has been busy, busy, busy! I've got so many ideas and not enough time to do them! We are learning about narratives, written descriptions, sustainable water environments and pollution, natural and processed materials and the design, make, appraise process in technology. Our report cards are due in just over a month! Golly gosh, that's just spiked my stress levels thinking about it!

Well anyway, this week in math, we have been learning about chance/probability. It's not a big area in math, but one that some kids have real trouble with. There are just so many ways to describe the chance of something happening. We've been doing lots of work with dice, spinners and cards. 

This is one activity we did later in the week. I gave each group a lunch bag that had a certain number of green and yellow counters e.g. 3 green, 7 yellow and a 10 frame. They weren't allowed to look in the bag at this point. They took it it turns with their partner to draw a counter, color in the box with the color and put the counter back in the bag. They then added their 10-frame to the chart below when done.

I then gave them the green sticky note and they had to predict how many of each counter they thought they had in their bag. Each group came up and showed us their 10-frame and told us their prediction and why they made that prediction before finally finding out how many of each counter they had. We discussed the chance of them drawing a particular color (e.g. a 3 in 10 chance), which colors were likely, unlikely, probable etc to be drawn and identified bags where each color had an equal chance or 50:50 chance of being drawn. Students then reflected in their math scrapbooks about their bags and the chance of each color being drawn and whether their prediction was sensible. 

Here's the 10-frame if you want it - it's a very simple file!

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