Grade 9 Culminating Practice

Grade 9s have a culminating task soon. They will be given a picture and they will need to create questions to answer related to measurement&geometry, number sense, and also financial decision making.

We have been practicing lately, and we made questions to solve using these images as inspiration.

Today we took some of the questions and then sorted them into mild, medium and spicy based on the calculations involved, the number of steps, and the complexity.

We chatted in our groups and tried to decide which questions involved more calculating than others, and we chatted about what we’d do to solve them.

It was interesting to see how some groups classified the same question in different categories.

We talked about how calculating the volume of ice cream in the cone could be a mild question if you ask for radius and height for each cone.

To make the question a medium one, we could ask for the cone’s circumference and slant height, and then asking how tall the ice cream will be above the cone part if the height of the ice cream that’s piled on top of the cone is 60% of the height of the cone. This question involves calculating the radius and using the pythagorean theorem to calculate the height of the cone. The height of the ice cream is used to help calculate another cone.

To make it a spicy question you could ask how many containers of ice cream to buy from the store to serve each classmate a cone like the ones illustrated. This question involves calculating all the ice cream in the cone, using dimensions, and then also using the volume of the container which could be given in litres to add unit conversion to the question.

Groups then split up and tackled a question from the list with information that was provided to them.

here’s one student who chose to calculate the volume of the pool and water slide.

Tomorrow is the big day where we’ll see the image we’re using for inspiration. We’ll get our groups together and make up questions to solve, and submit our requests for information.

Monday we’ll be working individually to solve the questions that were made in groups.