MPM1D1 - Day 9 Fractions and Measurement

I came across this problem last night so I thought I try it in class since we had been discussing fractions.

Some groups were quick to recognize that the fractions on both sides were equivalent, others performed the calculations and didn't really notice anything that was the same. I asked how they could compare the fractions. That was enough to get them to thing about reducing their answers. Some groups chose to scale the smaller numbers up. All the groups seemed to do just fine with the division, which was a bonus.

We moved on to Jon Orr's R2D2. Which didn't take long to solve. It was interesting to see that the half of the class on the west of the room did it one way (divide the width of the bulletin borad by the width of the sticky note to find how many would be needed, do the same for the width then multiply) and the groups on the east of the room all found the area of the board and the area of a sticky and divided them. Perhaps knowledge was moving around the room but not crossing the centre line.

Next up we were going to look Kyle Pearce's Big Nickel. I showed the video and asked how many of them had been to Sudbury and how many had seen the Big Nickel. I was surprised to see that only two of my students had seen the Nickel.  I then asked how many of them had been to Campbellford to see the Giant Toonie. It was about half the class so I decided to proceed with the toonie.

I showed a picture of the toonie. 

They asked some questions such as "How big is it?" and as a class we decided to find out how many real toonies would fit inside. I gave them the following information about the giant toonie and we headed to Wikipedia for details about the actual toonie.

I told them to assume that the giant toonie was built to scale and then set them loose. We haven't talked about measurement so I was keen to see where this would go. One group started by figuring how many toonies would fit across the diameter of the monument, another calculated the circumference of both. One group wanted to work on volume but couldn't remember how to find the volume of a cylinder so we talked about how to find the volume of a prism and I let them sort things out from there. We ran out of time so we'll have to pick up where we left off Monday.