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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