Hi, Folks,
I gotta be honest with you. This teacher has one thing and one thing only on her mind:
SPRING BREAK
So let me get down to business before I go all Teachers-Gone-Wild ...
CONFERENCES:
End of the year conferences are Friday, May 11th. Here is the schedule:
9:00-9:30-Gabriel
9:45-10:15-Oliver
10:30-11:00-Max
11:15-11:45-Bo
12:15-12:45-Aidan R.
1:00-1:30-Aidan H.
If you want to switch with anyone, please contact them and then let me know.
Probability and Statistics, Greek Style:
I presented the students with a bag full of cubes. The red cubes represented the brave hero Perseus, ready to cut off Medusa’s snaky head. The blue cubes represented the equally brave Theseus, slayer of the minotaur.
I told the children,
“In this bag, there are either:
A. 5 Perseus and 25 Theseus
B. 20 Perseus and 10 Theseus
C. 10 Perseus 20 Theseus.
Can you predict whether A, B or C is correct”
Each child drew a cube and recorded if it was a Theseus or a Perseus. After each draw, the cube was returned to the bag. After 10 draws, I asked if the kids were willing to take a guess about which bag I had. Some jumped right in with a guess, but a couple of others wanted to do some more draws before they were sure of their prediction. We drew 30 times all together and examined the outcome. At that point, the boys were pretty sure it was bag C. And they were correct! Some students did another version of this with Titans against Olympians.
Why is this important for these kids? Estimating and making decisions when you are uncertain is a skill we use every day, whether we realize it or not. Estimating costs for a meal, time needed for a project, the safety of crossing a street at certain times of the day; we do this almost without thinking. Knowing possible outcomes of a situation is really important for critical thinking skills. It challenges what the kid wants to happen with what actually does happen. We see this a lot in here in situations where “fairness” comes into question. It is still tough for some students to understand that one of these spinners is fair, and one is not. This led to a good class discussion about the fairness of choosing students to be the line leader each week, or to play a desired part in one of our skits. We often use a “fair” spinner to determine this, but it can still be hard to handle the outcome if it is not desired. But do we all have an equal chance? Yes. Are you always going to get the outcome that you really want? No. As we did our cube draw, some kids really, really wanted their favorite hero to win. But as they gathered data, they realized that might not happen.
Science meets art:
What happens when you mix milk, food color and Dawn dish soap?
ART!
Adding the color...
Adding the soap... STUNNING!!!
Other activities from this week:
Thinking Games
Games of strategy (with a Minotaur!)
Aidan H.’s Greek-inspired trivia game, “Hephaestus” (yes, he made it up!!)
Making a stop motion animation movie with our awesome Thursday volunteer, Jessie
And, oh, how we wish we had pictures from our Thursday afternoon water balloon extravaganza...but we were too busy pelting your boys with balloons during our epic “Dodge-balloon” battle. Victory!!!
Ok, I was actually the first to get out in “Dodge-balloon”. Darn kids and their quick reflexes.
Have a GREAT spring break!!!!
Amanda and Erin
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