A Measuring Problem

Today the triangles maths group looked carefully at a measurement problem.   This problem came from the NZMaths website... 

We made our own metre rulers using our 30cm classroom rulers to help us.  We noticed that our rulers weren't quite the right length.  We discovered that we needed to add three strips plus a bit more to get to a metre.  We talked about how 100cm is the same as 1 metre.  

Then Mrs Lee challenged us to think about how many strips we might need to make different lengths of rulers.  We had to think about what other knowledge we could use to help us to work this out.  Some of us worked out that our three times table was very useful for solving these problems.  We also worked out that we could use the answer to a previous problem to help us to work out the answer to the next problem. 

There was lots of talking about how we reached our answer for each problem and what might be an easier to way to get the answer for the next problem.  

Maths Week

Last week was maths week.  During the course of the week we competed in the Matific Games and some of us completed the Maths Week Daily Dollar questions.  

Screenshot from Maths Week Website https://www.mathsweek.co.nz/

We made a guesstimate on the number of lollies in Ms Madden's window but unfortunately we didn't have the closest guess.  We used a Google form to make our guesses and ended up with an average of 179.5 lollies.   Here is the graph that shows all our guesses... 

During the week we had a leaderboard that showed how many dollars we'd earned for completing Matific assignments and the maths week Daily Dollar questions.  Our final leaderboard looked like this... 

Once we had our total dollars we were allowed to buy an activity to complete this week.  We were allowed to combine our dollars so we could buy more activities.  With our dollars combined we managed to have enough to buy a virtual reality experience, a board game challenge and filming episode 2 of Room 18 Enviro news.    Unfortunately there are only so many days in the week and hours in a day so we'll have to save the Art/Craft and Maker Challenge and Mystery Hangout for another time. 

Looking at Standard and Non-Standard Measurement

We've been looking closely at measurement and why we need to use a standard unit of measurement to be able to compare our measurements with others. 

Yesterday when we used our hands we discovered that we couldn't compare the measurements because they were all so different even though we were very careful with the way we measured and we were all measuring the same thing. We added our hand measurements to the Google form (on the left).  It then graphed the answers for us.

Look at how different the measurements were ... 

Today we created our own rulers and re-measured the items we measured with our hands yesterday using rulers we had created.  We used strings of cm wide squares, we created a ruler that was 50cm long because it had 50 squares on it. 

Here are some photos of our rulers in construction and of us measuring the same things we did yesterday...

Watch this space for our next analysis of our measurements.

Term 3 Starts off with Inspiring Learning...

Room 18 have enjoyed an action packed first day of term 3 and we're looking forward to more awesome learning over the next few weeks.

Our Class Site
Mrs Lee introduced us to our new classroom site that we're going to use to support our learning.  Parents/caregivers please ask your children to show you the site and what they're using it for - you have to have a Sunnyhills account to access our site so they'll need to sign in to their accounts to show you.

We started the day sharing what we have been doing for the last two weeks while we've been away on holiday.  We added our thoughts to a Google form and turned it into a WordItOut.  Each of us had to use 3 words to describe our holiday.  Here is the WordITOut we created...

Technology Inquiry 
We took part in the first stage of our inquiry into inventions and how technology helps us.  We had to Get Thinking about what inventions we already know about and find out about more inventions, there are so many great things that people have created that help us.  Watch this space for more about our inquiry soon.


Measuring 
We also got into some Maths learning today - we investigated measuring with our hands.  We drew around our hand print and then cut it out.  We used this to measure many things in our classroom.  Here are so photos of us measuring.

We reflected on what we noticed while we were using our hands to measure things  - Non-standard measurement and why it's important to use standard measurements.