Project-Based Thanksgiving Math Inquiry

We started our first project-based Math inquiry on Tuesday. On Monday students presented their Subtraction Across Zeros Mini Project. We'll work on this Math inquiry even after Thanksgiving. Keep following our journey as we connect Math with real word scenarios and events.

Literacy Connection - looking at text features in an authentic advertisement. Are there any advertising gimmicks or claims? What colours are used to grab your attention? What was the original price before the item was discounted?

Comparing turkey prices at Food Basics and Freshco grocery stores. Which one is offering a better deal?

Some students wanted to know what Halal Turkey is. Mini cultural discussion on how Muslims slaughter animals.

Learning about conversion - how many pounds (lbs) are in a kilogram? / Multiplying decimals

Making a T-chart, observing patterns and plotting the data into a graph.

This student submitted this work as a bar graph. Other students in the class also had a similar graph. It was a teachable moment to talk about the differences between Discrete vs Continuous Data and how each is normally represented.

Students are now working on finalizing their grocery lists. While scanning the grocery flyers, some students commented on how expensive some items were. Welcome to the real world kiddies :-)

Multiplying and Adding Decimals for the grand total. Is all your shopping done now? We'll see tomorrow :-) 

Today the kiddies looked at their classmates' shopping list and found a few errors. We decided to do the calculations on paper. Surprisingly, there were 12 different answers! Who knew that adding decimals could be this fun! I then decided to play a game of Class vs Machine. The machine, of course, being a regular calculator!!! Two students' answers were correct. When asked about strategies to add a lot of numbers, they suggested two strategies - one was to keep adding to the original total and the other was to group the numbers and add three or four at a time.

 Most students ended up spending more than $60 on their grocery  bills.

But there was more shopping to be done .......

This is perhaps where the real challenge started. How to shop with a limited budget of $150. Some kiddies started to realize that the number of guests were now impacting on their budget. We'll do the debrief tomorrow of some of the challenges encountered and possible solutions.

Debrief about challenges and solutions.Kiddies realized just how difficult it is to work with a budgetary constraint.

With all the hassle involved in hosting our own Thanksgiving Dinner, we decided that it would be best to go to our parent's home this year. But our encounter with Math was far from over! Math is everywhere and now we needed to do more calculations in order to figure out the seating arrangements at the dinner.

The students came up with different multiplication strategies. These students used a regular algorithm to arrive at the answer:

 These students decomposed the number 24 in order to come up with the answer:

 These students used repeated addition:

This student rechecked his calculation using repeated addition

 This student used a halving and doubling strategy:

Our next task was to figure out the relationship between the number of chairs to the number of tables. Students started to discover that there was a pattern to figuring out all the answers.

During the debrief, students were all in agreement that the pattern or trick was finding the number of chairs by multiplying the number of tables by 2 and then adding 2.

Their answers were then converted to algebraic expressions using variables.

This student used a T-Chart and came to the conclusion that a total of 8 tables would be needed to seat 18 people

The next task required an exploration of various arrangements of tables and chairs.

This group is using linking cubes to create different arrangements.

Our Thanksgiving Dinner is FINALLY over and we are stuffed with knowledge !!! Good job kiddies!