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!

Remember to join up with the Clutter-Free Classrooms: Peek in my Planbook linky party!