The+Teachable+Moment

Block Building

With the stormy weather we have had lately, it ended up being an inside lunch yesterday. The class had just been using the blocks in maths to make 3D geometry shapes. A few of the boys asked if they could play with them during the wet lunch, our teacher said they could.

When Mrs Woods came back into the class at the end of lunch she was greeted by excited children all wanting to share what they had created at lunch. The boys had made the blocks link all the way around the room. More kids joined in and the class took ownership of the blocks and were proud of what they'd made. CHILDREN'S NAMES, ESTIMATION OF NUMBER OF BLOCKS AND NUMBER OF METRES

Sahrelle 1020 blocks 15m Arbaaz 280 blocks 12m Daewon 901 blocks 20m Joseph 605 blocks 17m Selena 634 blocks 11m Mikayla 285 blocks 18m Kayla 1050 blocks 15m Callum 560 blocks 19m Georgia 990 blocks 11m Nikita M 298 blocks 11m Lily 824 blocks 19.5m DeZiana 587 blocks 15m Biship 600 blocks 10m Raina 710 blocks 16m Rhiarna 1042 blocks 16m Montel 1000 blocks 20m Jay 914 blocks 25m Litysha 805 blocks 20m Maia 180 blocks 25m Tizona 999 blocks 15m Paige 567 blocks 15.5m Briaan 570 blocks 20m Tia 1000 blocks 19m Dallas 912 blocks 21m Nathan 780 blocks 15m Cyle 824 blocks 18m Jacob 1022 blocks 17m

In our class, room 18, we made a snakey monster made out of maths blocks. The people who were involved were:Nathan, Jacob, Cyle, Jay, Dallas, Daewon, Montel and Sahrelle. We all worked extremely hard and very carefully so I asked the maker’s for their following opinions:From Sahrelle Blocks-780, metres-15 From Jay Blocks-617,metres-35 From Jacob Blocks-750,metres-17 From Dallas Blocks-912,metres- 21 From Cyle Blocks-424,metres-18 From Nathan Blocks-780,metres-15 From Daewon Blocks-991, metres-20 From Montel Blocks-1200,metres-19. Those were the Maker’s Opinions. By Dallas

We have had the snake monster set up all week. If it gets broken we fix it. We like the Spiderwick Chronicles that our teacher has read to us and now we pretend that the snakey monster is the protective circle from the book and movie. We've enjoyed having the snakey monster in our class and will take it apart tomorrow, the last day of term, after we have measured it and know exactly how many blocks we used and how long it is.

We decided to use metre rulers to count how many blocks were in a metre to make it easier for us to count the total. We discovered that 54 blocks fit into a metre. 

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Once we had separated the whole snake into metres, we lined them up next to each other to make it easier to work out the total number of blocks. ===== We had 24 metres of 54 blocks plus 2 blocks left over. We decided to multiply 24m x 50 blocks to make it easier for ourselves and then add 24m by the remaining 4 blocks. So the equation was this: 24m x 50 blocks =? and 24m x 4 blocks + the 2 extra blocks. We decided multiplying by 100 would be quicker so we changed the first equation to 12m x 100 blocks (halved the metres and doubled the blocks). This gave us a total of 1200 blocks. We then had to work out 24m x 4 blocks + 2=? We decided to double 24 twice instead of using the 4 times table and 24 x 2 = 48. 48 x 2 = 96 + 2. 96 + 2 = 98. So...1200 + 96 = 1296 blocks.

Kayla thought there were 1050 blocks so her estimate was the closest and Maia and Jay thought it was 25m long so their estimate was the closest.

We had lots of fun and really enjoyed our maths learning :-)