Junior School: Year 1 – What does macaroni have to do with Maths you ask?
Last week the Year 1 girls and their families completed a Maths Inquiry which allowed them to explore open-ended problems.
Grace Chatfield
This focused on extended mathematical inquiry problems that:
- Are driven by an inquiry question;
- Contain ambiguities that require negotiation;
- Require mathematical evidence to address the problem and justify a proposed solution.
The girls were given a recipe which stated a ‘handful of macaroni’ was needed. Firstly, they traced all the hands of their family members and asked each family member to take a handful of macaroni. They then counted the pieces and recorded this on each of the pieces of paper they had traced the hands on. These numbers were then recorded on a number line using an App on their iPad.
Nina Steedman with her brothers James and Patrick
We concluded that every family member’s handful was different, so a ‘handful of macaroni’ in the recipe was not a reliable unit of measurement.
To conclude the project, they worked out which standard measuring cup would be needed if a handful was 100 pieces of macaroni.
Georgia Ktenavos
