The Activities
- Topics: Angles, Geometry: Book: Hamster Champs by S. Murphy.
- Topics: Jeopardy, Arithmetic, Story Problems, Measurement, Programming, Sudoku: We played Math Jeopardy this week. The problems can be downloaded here. The topics were
- Arithmetic Chains: The kids had to evaluate a chain of arithmetic operations from left to right: 7 * 8 + 9 / 5 = 13.
- Extra Information: These were story problems that all had some extra information. For example, John has 2 cakes, each with 7 pieces, and each piece has 227 sprinkles. How many pieces of cake are there?
- Estimation: We had a number of objects of different lengths, for each question the kids had to guess the length in cm within some bound (+-1 for a 5 cm object, +- 5 for a 40 cm object).
- Programming: The kids had to trace a program using our standard language and execution worksheet.
- Sudoku: The kids had to solve 4×4 sudoku with increasingly many numbers missing.
How Did It Go?
We had all 5 kids this week. The Age 5 circle didn’t happen this week so we both helped with the Age 7 circle.
Hamster Champs
This book was about angles. The kids really liked it. They loved the hamsters having to trick the cat.
Math Jeopardy
This was a very competitive game, it came down to the last question and the final difference was only 100 points. All the kids contributed to their teams. The way we handled the guessing was whichever team raised their hand first got to guess; if they were wrong, the other team got another 30 seconds to work on it; if they still got it wrong, the first team could guess again.
Arithmetic Chains
This was the easiest category. The first three were quite easy, but the division caused them more problems. 65 / 5 was fairly tricky for them. But in the end they got all of these correct.
Extra Information
The problem about the cupcakes (1000 cupcakes in 10 groups, 200 kids ate all but one from each group, how many left?) was the hardest in this group, and no one got it right. We got 10, 999, and 800 as answers. The 500 was answered correctly, but probably due to luck rather than fully understanding the answer.
Estimation
This was the category with the most zeroes; the kids consistently under-guessed. They usually missed by just a bit more than they were allowed to.
Programming
The 300 turned out to be the hardest for them, because they forgot how loops with multiple statements worked. We went over that problem after no one got it right; and then they were able to answer each of the 400 and 500. The 500 programming was the final question, and most of the kids made good progress on it.
Sudoku
The 200 puzzle was broken (I had made a mistake when preparing it, which is now fixed); one of the kids pointed it out almost immediately. 4×4 sudoku is easy enough that you can often guess and get it correctly on the first try. All the kids were able to make progress. All the puzzles were solved correctly but there was at least one incorrect guess.
