Tiddlywinks Treat

 Room 9 filled their marble jar - awesome teamwork Room 9!

As a reward the children voted on a boys vs girls game, so Mrs Walker had to think of one.

I decided everyone would love tiddlywinks and I was right. Lots of the children hadn't seen the game before so they really enjoyed it.

We included it in our math focus on Friday. Each team (boys and girls) had a player go up and flick their tiddlywink. If they were not happy with their shot, they got one more chance but you had to accept your second score.

Mrs Walker wrote a scale of centimeters on the carpet with chalk (sorry Mr Hogg). The children got a great sense of distance between 2 and 3 metres. We discussed the likelihood of getting a 4 or 5 metre jump and everyone agreed it was unlikely but we couldn't say it was impossible- we've been reading a book about probability, can you tell?

 Then we ran into a problem, the boys were outraged that there were more girls in the class and William was away so it was even more unfair.

We needed a solution:

Ashley said why don't four more boys just have a go. The boys agreed and chose the four boys who had made the longest jumps. They chose Jacob who got a massive jump more than three metres- more of a roll than a jump.

Then the girls decided that wasn't fair because the boys would probably get big jumps again.

We had to work out a fair way to pick. Jacob thought that Mrs Walker could pick but some boys thought it wouldn't work because she was also a girl.

Mrs Walker told the children about picking randomly and we selected four boys at random.
Jacob was one of them, and on the second go all of the boys improved their jumps by a lot. The girls were worried.

Each thinking partner pair got a calculator and added up both the boys and girls totals. They were very careful and systematic, everyone did it three times and were surprised at how easily you could get the wrong result.

The pairs worked out some excellent ways to record each total and we were all happy that we had the correct totals as most groups ended up with the same totals for most of their calculations.

In the end the boys had the largest total. Then Mrs Walker demonstrated how to work out the average. We divided the totals by the number of girls and then the boys total by the number of throws the boys had. Guess what, the girls had the greater average.

Two winning teams, thanks to maths.