My Name is 256

As a bit of fun this week, the boss has decided that teachers are going to wear a number around their necks - no, we are not all convicts doing time - it's a cunning plan to get the kids to look at numbers in new ways. We did a similar activity last year when we gave the kids a tables fact to wear for the day.

The whole idea is that the students are not allowed to use the names of the teachers. They need to call them by a number combination or calculation that equals their number.

For example, my number is 256, or as my daughter now calls me, 16<sup>2  

Then, during the week, children are encouraged to record their calculations on white boards around the school. Here's an example of one:</sup>

^{AND we get to have some fun with Maths!}

Probability With Our Kindergarten Buddies

We finished our week of Chance and Probability with a visit to our Kindergarten buddies. To make this visit interesting, we all designed probability games that we could share with them.

Here are a few of the results:

 

This was very simple and very effective. You get six cups (probably label them the right way up next time) and a stack of dice. Each time you roll one you put it in the corresponding cup to see which score occurs most frequently. Obviously, you are more likely to roll a 4 than a 2 when you play this game, disproving the idea that there is an equal chance of getting any number from 1-6.

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A nice use of a colour wheel. You drop the marble on the centre point and see where it rolls. An unusual choice to have 13 sectors but a great way to have 3 chances that are equal and one that is slightly more probable than the others.

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We had talked about the "Monty Hall" problem in class (click here to see a Youtube clip about it) so one student decided to make his own version, where you could win two brussels sprouts, two goats or a car and a lollypop. 

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Here is a very elaborate game that one boy made for his buddy. There are two sets of marbles - one black and one silver. Each player chooses a colour and then rolls the marbles onto the board, recording what colour they land on. At the end of 5 rounds, the players compare the frequencies of each colour.

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Some boys brought in their car collections and got their buddies to sort them based on colour. They prepared a data table and a set of questions for their buddies:

The data table as completed by the buddies.

 

And the set of questions. Love the last question!

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This was a great activity because the student had thought through what they wanted to do and wrote an excellent set of instructions. 

As a writing task, it was excellent. 

As a maths task, it was excellenter.

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Another very elaborate activity that involved heads and tails, a colour wheel, colour stars, glitter, sparkly things and coloured glass jewels. The buddy was in heaven! 

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I always come away from these activities totally blown away by the creativity of my students. They always think of things that I would never have considered and never fail to demonstrate their own learning through what they choose to teach to their kindergarten buddies.

Ah, Year 6 - you've done it again!

 

What Are The Chances of That?

This week we have dedicated to Chance and Probability. It has been a lot of fun. We had a series of 10 activities for the kids to engage in and collect data. They were also required to design their own chance activities or games and share them with their Kindergarten buddies - I will share the results in a later post.

One of the biggest learnings for the week was all about recording data. When we were conducting probability activities like tossing a coin or dealing cards, it became important to keep an accurate record of what had happened. As a consequence, the students quickly discovered that poor recording led to inaccurate and unreliable conclusions. Conversely, careful recording resulted in accurate conclusions. 

Here are the 10 tasks that we embarked upon and some examples of how the students recorded their results:

Some very detailed recording of heads and tails.

Interesting use of colour to highlight features in the data such as most and least frequently occurring scores

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Interesting to see who is familiar with a deck of cards - how many cards are there, what are the suits called, how do you shuffle cards - all useful insights. Setting out the data carefully makes it so much more useable when you need to discuss your results.

This is really interesting - and isn't anywhere near 365.

Check out The Birthday Paradox 

An interesting activity - if only to see who actually knew what their phone number was.

Most kids have it programmed into their phones so they don't have to remember it these days.

An interesting spread of data here. Not many big words on the front page - mostly 2, 3 or 4 letter words.

Not psychic I guess - even though the first 6 guesses were correct! 

What are the chances of that?

This was just for a bit of fun but also to see how everyday games involve chance. Surprising how many of the kids not know how to play this game. It was a great opportunity to learn a new game.

Haven't got this far yet and it's the end of the week!

Where did the time go?

A few groups got to this but the data display wasn't very interesting 

so I haven't posted a picture.

Maths in the Year 6 Exhibition 2013 - Part 2

It's been a few days now and the Exhibition has been and gone. I have reflected on what we experienced and have identified a few more ideas relating to Maths that came out of the kids' inquiries.

Here we go....

Timelines

Quite a few groups used timelines to present information - after all our transdisciplinary theme was "Where we are in place and time." Lots of them were fairly traditional timelines but there were a few that showed some excellent creativity.

Here are a few:

One of the "Fashion" groups did a really good timeline using miniature dresses that they had made to demonstrate the changes to fashion over time.

Another (different) "Fashion" group used shoeboxes for a timeline. Inside each box was a pair of shoes that represented the fashion of that decade.

The "Women's Rights" group (ironically) used a clothesline to display their timeline of significant events in the history of the women's movement.

Voting and Polls

Several groups decided to ask their visitors questions about their inquiry and were able to represent their data in interesting ways.

The Women's Rights group asked a question about the Suffragette movement.

Then people were asked to place a gold (wedding ring-like) ring into a jam jar. (Irony again?)

Gold rings laid out on a beautiful silver tray.

Visitors got to put their "vote" into one of three jars.

Another group, inquiring into developments in medicine, conducted an activity that asked visitors to place a small coloured bead into empty medicine boxes if they thought that the product contained penicillin.

Results were tallied to see which products were most easily recognised as containing penicillin.

Another group looked at "Body Image" and the influence of Barbie dolls on young children. They asked people to decide which doll they preferred, Barbie or "Emme" - a doll with "real" proportions.

Vote by placing a picture into the correct box.

Representing Data

There were several other interesting ways that data was managed and presented.

A group that was looking at Post Traumatic Stress used plastic soldiers in a sand tray to demonstrate the percentages of soldiers who would experience PTSD.

Presented with this data, visitors were asked if they could model the percentages using the plastic soldiers in the sand tray

Showing that 1 in 5 veterans get PTSD - 4 soldiers on the left out of 20 on the right.

Another group was looking at sweatshops and sporting clothes manufacturing. They wanted to show different perspectives so they constructed a Venn diagram using hoops suspended by fishing line.

There ideas were organised to show their understandings of the issues involved.

I was impressed! I thought they had demonstrated their understandings in very creative ways. 

It's always good to give the kids some room to do things their own way - they will always come up with things that you don't expect!

Maths in the Year 6 Exhibition 2013 - Part 1

What a week - I am exhausted! I imagine the kids are too after an amazing PYP Exhibition. This is a culminating activity  for students who reach the end of the Primary Years Programme where they get to develop their own inquiry into an area of interest. 

Being transdisciplinary in nature, I am always keen to see how the kids will use maths in their Exhibition presentations. How will they display data? How will they analyse data? What creative ways will they find to use maths to make sense of what they are doing?

It will probably take a few posts to get all the information up about the different inquiries the students engaged in.

Here's an example of how one group inquired into the use of transport by people coming into our school each morning...

Displaying Data

The "Transport" group decided to collect some data about the makes of cars that come into our school each morning and also how many people were in each car. So they got to school  about 45 minutes early and set themselves up near the front entrance.

When they collated their data they decided to display it as a picture graph because the audience for exhibition was going to include a wide age range, from pre-school to pensioners. 

They made a second graph based on the fuel consumption of the most popular cars to come into the school each morning. At this point they realised that their initial data collection only included the make of car, not the model as well. Consequently, they decided they would calculate what the fuel consumption for an "average" Toyota etc would be by getting the fuel consumption of all models of each make of car and finding the mean. 

They also distributed a survey via Survey Monkey to all the staff at the school to see how they commute. The first graph shows that the vast majority drive cars while only a few walk, ride bikes or catch buses. 

The second graph asked how many people came in the car with you. This question was a bit ambiguous as there was no option for zero - did it include the driver or not? Anyway, the most overwhelming response was "1" - which might mean none or one.

The final graph asked for the age of the car that was driven. They asked this question to explore the idea that older cars produce more pollution. It also showed that not many teachers have new cars, in fact many have cars that are 10 years old or older.

Data Analysis

The data for this group was well displayed and easy to read. The really exciting part was reading their analysis of what they had learnt.

Here are a few of their comment:

Well, I'm not buying a Lexus then - I think I'll get a Land Rover.

Or...if you can afford a Lexus, do you worry about the cost of petrol?

Australia is very big on 4x4 cars. Interesting to see some data.

Can you get this from the data or would you need to ask a few more questions?

This one makes me ask a few questions - where are they driving? City? Country? How fast are they going? Does it matter? What type of Toyota do they have? How big is the bucket?

Like all good learning, it made me want to ask more questions. Hopefully, the "Transport" group feel the same.