Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 2, Numbers Big and Small (1st – 2nd)
The students had great enthusiasm today again in Numbers Big & Small! We started the day seeing what 1 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, and finally 1 million jelly beans look like. The 1 million canister was much taller than a Volkswagen beetle!
The class created a room-length number line from 1-10,000. They measured to place key numbers (2,500, 5,000, and 7,500) on the number line. We chose worldwide destinations and went to the computer lab to research about them. These included everything from homes here in Nashville, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids of Giza, Great Wall of China…….The students calculated their distances from Vanderbilt University in miles and kilometers. Then, the students made notecards noting the sites and distances from here. We placed them on our number line. This was our own version of The Amazing Race!
With the distances, we discussed estimating, rounding, and greater than/less than. We figured which ones would round to the same distance from Vanderbilt if we rounded to the nearest thousand. The students chose 3 of the destinations, added their mileage, and figured out what the round-trip mileage would be. Our class discussed the range of miles on the number line, which included Taipei as our furthest destination, and West Longdale Drive in Nashville as our closest.
For our art piece today, we talked about M.C. Escher’s famous “Relativity” piece. The students had a fine insight into the impossible angles of the staircases. They mentioned seeing a triangular shape defined by the three main staircases. We related it to Harry Potter’s moving staircases. We loved their ideas and thoughts!
As a class, we reread the Ole Miss Contest question. Together, we discussed our ideas and new ways to solve it. The class suggested we use calculators. Then several students quickly all came up with the same answer independently. So, we submitted our answer, received an immediate response, and got it correct!
Our weather was nice in the early afternoon. We took a “Numbers Walk” outside “looking” for numbers everywhere. The students were quite creative. They found many numbers including 3,000,000+ blades of grass; 16 steps; 38 columns……..
At the end of the day, the students started learning the Five Crowns card game. It’s a rummy-style game with 5 suits: spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds, and stars. The students looked for books and runs and tried to make sets with their cards. There are rotating wild cards as well as a different number of cards for each hand. (The game begins with 3 cards in the round so 3s are wild; the next round has 4 cards so 4s are wild…..) At the end of each round, the players must add up the cards still left in their hands (that didn’t make it into a set).
Dinner table questions:
- What destination did you choose to research? Why did you choose it? Where was it distance-wise compared to others? What were other destinations?
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What did you find on the “Numbers Walk”?
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Did you have any ideas to solve the Ole Miss contest?
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Can you explain about the game Five Crowns? (Some students are still learning, but others have caught on.)
We look forward to tomorrow!
Warmly,
Ms. Elizabeth & Ms. Sharon