The purpose of this activity is to engage students in using mathematical strategies to solve a measurement problem in context.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A year 6 class is studying healthy foods and wants to show, at a school assembly, how bad sugary drinks are.
The class has found out that sugar makes up one tenth of the volume of a popular soft drink.
The class plans to ask each of the 600 students in the school to bring in their drink bottles filled with the same amount of water as a 500 mL (half a litre) soft drink bottle holds. This is so that the class can tell the school it is just as well they have water in the bottles because, if they had a soft drink...what a huge lot of sugar they would all be consuming.
They will have on stage, the volume of sugar that would be in all of the drink bottles if they contained the sugary soft drink rather than water. The sugar will be placed in 2 L icecream containers.
How many icecream containers will they need?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student uses multiplication and division to find the number of covert (cm3) of sugar in 600 mL of soft drink. They multiply the unit rate per student by 600 to get the total volume of sugar. Finally, they covert mL to litres and divide to find the number of icecream containers needed.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student uses a diagrammatic strategy to represent the quantities. They use rounding to 0.5L and multiplication to get a unit rate of 40 student bottles of sugar to 1 icecream container. They divide 600 by 40 to get the correct answer of 15 icecream containers.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/loads-sugar at 5:53am on the 22nd May 2024