Miss Vine’s Class

During term 3 and 4 the students have been exploring maths through ‘real life’ situations. They have been using ‘hands-on’ materials, the computers and technology skills to further their understandings.

Fruit Tree Maths

This task required the students to roll a dice for 30 seconds and place counters of a particular colour on their trees. They then counted them either by ones, twos, fives or tens and drew their fruit on the trees. Once they had done this they were faced with the challenge to divide their fruit evenly amongst their family members. This lead to remainders and fractions being introduced. Finally, the children used coles online to find out the unit price of thier fruit and calculate the total value of their trees. Thus, introducing multiplication with decimals.

Aussie Flag Maths

This task required the students to use their knowledge of fractions to design a new Australian flag. Three colours relating to Australia were chosen by the students; 5/8 of the flag needed to be yellow, 1/4 of the flag needed to be dark green, and 1/8 of the flag needed to be either light green, blue or orange. The students were able to use the computer or draw the flag on paper.

My Fraction

This task required the students to work in pairs and investigate a fraction of their choice and ability level. Some of the concepts the students investigated were: equivalence, adding/subtracting with their fraction, fractions of quantities, real life examples of their fraction and converting their fraction to a decimal.

Measurement – Length

Two fun activities that we have done so far in measurement are estimating how long 1m is and estimating the length of different body parts.

Estimating how long 1m is: This was done by having each student place a star sticker on themselves.

In giga gang’s maths class today we started work on measurement. I got given a star sticker to stick on my body were I thought a meter was on me from the ground up. We then measured where a meter was. When I measured I found that I had put the sicker 85cm from the ground up. I was 15cm off where a meter was. By Naomi

Estimating My Body Parts: The students were required to draw a picture of themselves on both sides of a piece of poster paper. On the first side they chose different body parts and estimated the length of them using string. They then attached these pieces of string to their poster on the specific body part and recorded the lengths. The students then turned their poster over and used rulers to measure the actual length of the body parts they estimated. They cut lengths of string according to these measurements and attached them to their poster. The gallery of photos shows an example of this activity.

Housing Estate Project

In order to extend some of my students with their fractions, decimals and percentages knowledge and skills they were given a sheet with a number of different parameters about a housing estate. For example, the students knew there were 32 houses in the estate, but were required to find out the features of each by calculating different fractions, percentages and decimals (i.e. 1/4 of the houses have a red roof, .875 of the houses have a white picket fence). See the gallery for their exciting models!