We started today by finishing up yesterday's question: how many boxes of Post-it notes would we have to buy to cover the classroom walls? Many students had not gotten past the point of writing down the dimensions (some hadn't even done that - sigh) so we started there. I circulated and helped them get going by walking them through how to find the area of one wall. They had to choose which units to work in - some chose inches, one chose metres, but most worked in centimetres. They made errors along the way, had trouble figuring out what to do about the cabinet at the back of the room, but eventually did some reasonable calculations. I found that holding a piece of paper to represent the wall and a calculator to represent the cabinet helped them see that only the height and width of the cabinet were important for our calculations and that the depth was not relevant. By the time one student got all the way to the answer of 10 boxes (yay!), they were all far enough along that we could take it up. Here is some of that (we did the other 3 walls too):
Phew! That took way longer than anticipated. Next we needed to figure out if those 10 boxes of Post-it notes would fit in the cardboard box with the given dimensions (the box from Amazon I had at home!).
We discussed the fact that we were not talking about area anymore, but volume. They needed the thickness of 1 Post-it note pad, which we approximated as 1 cm. We had already converted the 3" by 3" to cm, so we were ready to calculate the volume:
They then calculated the volume of the given box.
I hope you all are impressed with my amazing artistic talent!
With only 10-ish minutes left, we launched into the next question.
What I wrote was true. Of course when I went to our local store this morning to buy 473 ml containers of chocolate milk, they had 500 ml containers. Argh! Thankfully my colleague, Julia, spotted students in her morning class drinking from 473 ml container (which they must sell in the cafeteria) and grabbed them for me once they were empty. Yay, Julia! So in class we got as far as calculating the height for the 500 ml container. To do this they needed to measure the containers that I had bought - 1 for each group, after which they were allowed to share the chocolate milk : )
This class leaves me both exhausted and exhilarated on a daily basis. I really like them and it is so great to see them gaining confidence and starting to persevere with problem solving.
Day 21 & 22
I will be away so here is the plan. Finish this work... height for 473 ml container then these 2 tasks:
After that they will cut out and glue 4 examples in their comp books; one for each of surface area and volume of rectangular prisms and cylinders.
Next they have a worksheet of word problems that will hopefully help consolidate what we have been working on this week.
Then it's March break, so I will get a break from blogging. I will be back on March 17th! Thanks for reading.
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