Spring SAVY 2018, Day 2- Probability and Prediction (Kindergarten)
It was another great week! We started the class by revisiting spinner experiments. The students used a fair spinner which was divided into 4 equal sections. After we ran tests, with that spinner the students had a chance to design their own unfair spinner. They were asked to try and rig the results of their spinner experiment. For example one student wanted to make sure he landed on 3 the most. He drew a spinner where 3 took up most of the face of the spinner. Another student wanted to land on 3 and 4 frequently. She drew a spinner where 3 and 4 took up a large and equal part of the spinner which left just a small space for the numbers 1 and 2. All of the students achieved their desired rigging results. This led to another great conversation about possible vs. likely. We talked about how it would be possible to land on the number that took up less space on the spinner, but it was more likely that they would land on the numbers that took up the larger amount of space.
The next experiment was a mystery box. Inside the box was an assortment of 22 cubes. I cut a corner from each box, and we shook the box to see what cube appeared in the corner. We kept track of the color of the block. We were going to guess the assortment of colors based on our results. As we were keeping track, we thought about how many times we would count the cube colors. We stopped after looking 5 times, and we all agreed that was not enough. One student suggested 800 times, and we talked about how that would take way too long and the information would be too confusing. We ended up deciding that 25-30 was enough to help us make a reasonable guess about what was inside the box. One student brought up the idea that we could just be seeing the same block over and over again, and that helped us think about that idea of possible vs. likely.
Next week, we will be looking at some board games. If you play board games during the week with dice, spinners, or cards try to include some conversations about probability.
Lara Webb