A 400km Journey...

Come check out the model...

For maths on Thursday, we investigated a problem for a 400km journey to Wellington. The journey actually is approximately 300km, but we took an extra 100km of detours.

The problem was to find out fractions of the journey on a number line. So how far had we traveled to reach 1/2 of the way there? Or 3/4 and so on. Many of us needed materials to help us to see it, so we got out the tens place value blocks. 40 x 10 = 400 km. Each cube on the ten block = 1km. So 20 blocks was half of 40 blocks and it represented 200km. Half of 400km is 200km. And so on. Jack took some photos of our model.

40 km is 1/10 of 400 km

50 km is 1/8 of 400km

Hi Taylor!

We have reached halfway!

1/5 of 400km = 80km, so 2/5 = 160km

300km, 3/4 there.

The real journey is 296km...

Tracey's Amazing Park

Recently, our students have been designing parks for their maths learning and home links. They also had a go at working out the perimeter, area and volume of parts of the park. Many of the students created physical or digital models of their parks. Here is Tracey's outstanding example. She has even worked out the volume of her toilets.

Look at Tracey's 3D model and her measurements!

Here are some other fantastic parks on our student blogs:

• Maia's Park using Little Story
• Kyra's Everything Park
• Jacob's BLING $ BLING Park (Build with Chrome)
• Jacko's Fun Park 
• Matilda's Minecraft Park
• Elijah's Awesome Park 
• Ben's Minecraft Park

Designing a new swimming pool

The rich task - key tricky word - compound shape!

Today, we did self assessment of where we thought we were on our rich task progression. It was a tough rich task and us teachers had many debates on ways to work it out.

Room 6 assessed what we could do well and what our next steps in learning are. Click on the cluttered notes on our Padlet and you can scroll through which each student wrote.

Created with Padlet

1 square metre = 10 000 square centimetres

Today in maths, we proved that 1 square metre equals 10 000 square centimetres. It seemed unbelievable at first, but we proved it was true! Thank you to Kayla for inspiring the investigation when solving the perimeter and working out how to find the area for her bivvy.

Taylor, Maia and Julius were so excited that they created an iMovie about it and begged to continue the project during their lunchtime! I was so excited that I had to call Miss Hill in to check it out. She joined in and got us thinking about how big one hectare is.

One Square Metre from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.

Perimeter and Area of a Bivvy

Jaidyn's 3D bivvy model

For our Survivor Camp, we are going to make bivvies to sleep in. There is a back-up plan involving tents if they don't quite work out! On Monday, we tried measuring the perimeter and working out the area a bivvy would take up. We tackled this challenge with our learning buddies. Now we are working out how much the perimeter and area would be for a three person bivvy. I am very impressed by the thinking, measuring and problem solving using number strategies!

Now some students are designing 3D models of their bivvies.



Perimeter & Area of a Bivvy from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.

Sharing Money

Our maths topic is all about money. We will be using money as a context to learn how to use lots of different number strategies and build our number knowledge. It will be lots of fun!

We have started off with some sharing problems. It is has been great to see the students work out how to share the dollars and then break it down into sharing cents when it is needed to make the equal shares.

Kyra shows how to solve problem one!

Problem two

Zach has problem two sorted with the money equipment

Mathletics 2013

Here are our five finalists from Room 16 for Mathletics 2013.

We were learning to use geometric designs to create a poster. It involved a lot of accurate measuring and drawing.

Create a Symmetrical Mathletics Poster:

We will know we can do this when:
 Used a ruler to accurately measure and draw all straight lines
 Our design is symmetrical (balanced) from the centre or rotated
 Any curved lines are drawn with a compass
 There are no free drawn lines
 Has Mathletics 2013 carefully drawn 
 Black and white only- (sharpie)
 All unneeded pencil lines are rubbed out. 

Joshua, Year 6

Tyrone, Year 5

Elijah, Year 5

Hannah, Year 6

Cameron, Year 5

1.5 kilometres

Today we worked at calculating the distance to Camp Kaitawa from Google Maps directions. To do this we had to convert between metres and kilometres. For example 600m and 2.4km. This has led us to investigate what that decimal point means and what the digit that comes after it means. Zeb, Henry and Crighton contributed to this ShowMe to help us understand 1.5 kilometres.

Maths Investigation

How would you solve this problem? What would you do first?

Update: This was a bit tough so I had a go at creating a ShowMe. It's not the best but we don't learn if we don't try!

Drawing a 10cm Square

Drawing a 10cm Square from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.

WALT create mathematical patterns. Here is a small but very important step along the way: measuring accurately.

He aha te taima?

Today Whae Harata came into class. She taught us how to tell the time using te Reo and an awesome waiata to sing. Felicity edited the video of us singing the waiata using iMovie on the iPad.

Whakarongo Ki Te Karaka from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.

WALT: use number strategies to find perimeter

A quick question to explore and develop our understanding of perimeter while using our number knowledge.

This image is from the maths dictionary.

 Below is an example from Katrina.

Here is another from Sami.