Ms. Bearse's Site

 We cut out quadrilaterals, found midpoints of each side, joined them and found that it makes a parallelogram in the middle….every single time!  
    
We tried the same activity with triangles.  The inner triangle is 1/4 the area of the big triangle.  It’s a scaled down version.

there’s an ultimate frisbee tournament today.  We took a break from indoor math to go watch the frisbee game, and do some math at the field. 

 we estimated the dimensions of a frisbee using objects of known size.  Since we don’t have rulers in our pockets, we used shoes which have their length in cm written inside.

We also estimated the perimeter of the fence around the field, we looked at the slopes of the stairs and bleachers, and compared the areas of the frisbee field with the scoring zones.  

  
What comes next?

   
If you look at all of the angles in a triangle, label them and then rip them apart, and put them together a little differently you can prove that the sum of the angles is 180 degrees.

  
 Period B was replaced today by an all candidates meeting.  We have a student vote on Thursday, and of course election day is Monday the 19th.  We got to ask the candidates running for MP questions on local and federal issues.

Today we put our knowledge into action.  The challenge was to create a square based prism 12 cm tall and a square based pyramid also 12cm tall.  The square bases could be any dimensions, but must be te same for the prism and pyramid.

planning is an important first step.

Next we measured and carefully cut out our pieces.

We used old filing folders that the school wanted recycled.

After a little tape and glue we had the solids formed.

We added the calculations for area and volume of each solid, and also the area and volume of the pair together if combined.

We can now calculate the volume of prisms, cones and pyramids.  Today we took small containers and measured them.  We then calculated how many times we could fill the small one with water and empty it into the big container without overflowing it.

pyramids and cones can be dumped three times into the prism with the same base and height dimensions.

We used two cylindrical containers next, and to prove how confident we were, someone sat beneath the container being filled.  These are the moments where you want to triple check your calculations!

   
 
We’ve graphed our bean growth and projected the trends to estimate their height on October 15th.  We used a line of best fit and extrapolated in order to do this.  We also used interpolation to determine the height of the plants on the weekends when we weren’t there to measure them.

Are we making careless errors? Computation errors? Precision errors? Or problem solving errors?

we’re correcting the quiz we recently did, and analysing the types of errors we each make.  Hopefully then we will be more aware when we write the next quiz.