It's All About the Money

Last week my Year 8 groups and my Year 5 group were using play money. Money is good to use because it relates to real life. Everyone of my students has had experience at some point of handling money and buying or selling goods in exchange for money. 

My year 5's role played 'Shop Keepers'. They took turns being a shop keeper and had to sell an item to a customer. The problem for them in this challenge was working out how much change to give back i.e. if a drink cost $3.80 and they were given a $10 note, how much change do they give back? This involves using knowledge of place value, counting, addition, subtraction, parts of a whole (fractions) and decimals

My year 8's were first asked to count the pile of money put in front of them then they were asked to use money to solve addition and subtraction story problems involving money. 

Here are a couple of photos of one of my year 8 groups engaged in using their money to solve a problem.

My year 5 students (below) playing 'Shopkeepers'

Place Value - What is it all about?

Welcome back to term 2!

My students have gotten straight back into learning all they can about mathematics. 

Today Group 1 and 2 started to look at Place Value. Place Value can be one of the trickier areas for children to understand so we started right at the beginning. I gave each group a task - to estimate the number of ice block sticks in the big pile in front of them. After they had all estimated we discussed which way would be the best and fastest way to count. Some said in two's or fives while others said ten. So they were then asked to bundle each stick in to groups of ten and tie it with a rubber band. This is developing the concept of trading. Children need to understand that when we have ten ones we need to change them into 1 ten (a bundle or group) and ten bundles of ten makes one hundred. Once we had created all our bundles of ten (and/or hundreds) we were able to count together in tens and work out who's estimation was closest to the number of sticks that were in the original pile.

After that we used the sticks and bundles (ones/tens) to form an equation. It was the student's job to work out how many were all together by separating the ones and tens when adding. The year 5's were also using hundreds. See below :)

Learning to Trade - Place Value

As a warm up, Group 1 played a place value trading game we call 'The Shark Game'. 

In the game there are worms, small fish and a shark. The aim of the game is to win the shark. In order to do that the children must roll two die and whatever number they roll i.e. 8, equates to how many worms they take. Once they have ten worms they can trade these ten for one small fish. They keep taking turns with the die, collecting worms and trading them for small fish until they get ten small fish which they can then swap for one shark and then they win the game. 

This is a great game for reinforcing the fact that in place value we must change 10 ones into 1 ten and when we have 10 tens we change it for 1 hundred. They are quick to pick up this trading aspect with ten quickly, especially if they see that the other students have more small fish!

 

Money, Money, Money

Group 1 had the task of figuring out over two sessions, the total value of each box of dots. There were black, white and grey dots which had values of $1, $2 and .50c. Check out the video below which shows two of the group members discussing their answers.

Below is a picture of their activity and their working out.

Problem Solving

Group 1 & 4 both had problem solving questions to work on today but since they are quite new to it, it was more of an introduction on how to decode the question (what is it asking us to do?).

We also discussed the rules of the group - each member needs to ask questions of each other and use the knowledge of the group before they can ask the teacher. This teaches the students to critically examine their own thinking and helps students to cosolidate learning and learn from each other. Here is the work from today.

As you can see they made a great start : )

Group 1 (Mya, Ripeka, Michael, Sacred & Heseti)

A Prey Mantis crawled in while we were working which was perfect for the group as they could check the number of legs and add it into the solution to their problem!

Group 4 (Losana, Andre and Giovanni)

They spent a lot of time just trying to work out what the question was asking us by underlining and re-reading. It took them a little while but they got there in the end so they only just started on their problem which can be answered in many different ways. Below they began by grouping and using repeated addition. We will look at faster ways to answer this type of problem when they have run out of their own ideas. With more practice they will be unstoppable  : )

UPDATE: They solved it! check out the second photo.

The question was "In the fruit room there are some apples left over. Carol needs to share these apples out amongst three classes with eighteen students in each class. How many apples does Carol start with?

Term 1 Groups Begin

I am so excited to have begun working with my wonderful students.

I have four groups - 2 x year 8s, 1 x year 2/3 and 1 x year 5's. Here are some of these awesome kids below.

Group 1

Mya, Michael, Ripeka, Sacred, Heseti

Group 2

Serenity, Shaza, Dorothy, Sisilina

Group 4

Giovanni, Losana, Andre

Group 3

Teri, Vera, Faleupolu, Paul, Bethel