Junior School Math Highlights

As we approach the holiday season, the calendar is chock-full of engaging activities. Students happily dressed up in colourful festive outfits, shopped with bagfuls of toonies, wrapped presents galore, broke their fast with Santa, and performed in several winter concerts. The cherry that sits atop this flurry of fun is the myriad of math projects that students have been busily completing. These projects are designed to be a culminating activity that showcases what students have learned and how they can apply their knowledge and skills in a creative new way. An important part of the process is to make a connection between the math concepts learned and a personal interest, a real-life context, or a concept learned in a different subject area. Ah, the holiday season . . . such good times for all. 

 

Our grade 2 students have been connecting their problem-solving skills to the holidays with an activity called "12 Days of Winter Word Problems." Students also wrote reflections in their journals about how they use math in their daily lives. In grade 4, dining out was the theme of the week, as students participated in a Multiplication Restaurant Project. They enjoyed coming up with their own restaurant idea, creating the layout for their eatery and designing the menu. Over in grade 5, students worked in small groups to design and produce original board games that incorporated computational skills and worded problems. Games included connections to themes such as dragon adventures, outer space and picnic journeys.

This month our grade 6s learned about the theoretical and experimental probability involved in single outcome events, such as rolling a die, choosing a card or rotating a spinner. Students enjoyed creating their own digital games of chance and infusing them with personal interests and ideas based on popular culture. Grade 7s hopped, skipped and enjoyed the Barbie Bungee Jumping Project to finish off their linear relations and algebra unit. This project involved measuring the distance of the bungee jump, graphing their data, and converting their graph into a linear relation.