1. The Kumara Pot
- This is a problem-solving task where students could use the estimate and improve method or a more systematic method using a table or spreadsheet.
- You could extend this task by asking students to choose an ingredient of their own, such as tomatoes or eggs etc, and find some recipes they might make out of this ingredient.
They could choose four or five recipes and decide how to divide the ingredient between the recipes to make about the same
quantity of each.
2. Animal facts
- The facts that students find may be given as decimals, so students must be proficient at working with decimals before embarking on this task.
- Here are some websites you could start with.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/facts-pictures/
www.wellingtonzoo.com/content/animals/our-collection.aspx
www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-lion.html
Teaching ideas
This link displays the Getting started on page 195 to use as a class practical.
You could do the weighing of the water and get the class to work out where the water must be filled to measure the dimensions of the container to conclude that 1 L = 1000 cm3.
Realistically it will only be possible to make an approximation for this as it will be difficult to measure accurately.
You could use this as a class discussion.
This link displays some facts about New Zealand forests.
Ask students to work out how many ha have been destroyed on average each year, day, hour, minute since 1000 AD.
This relates to question 6 of Activity 2.
This is a good link www.teara.govt.nz/en/conifer-broadleaf-forests/5/1
This link displays the practical on page 199. You could display this on a write-on surface and fill in the gaps as the class works out the answers.
You could use this as a class activity to help visualize what a hectare looks like.
Teacher notes
- It is best if students are able to work out whether to multiply or divide using common sense rather than using an algorithm.
Get them to think about the units they are converting between and decide if the answer will be bigger or smaller than the number they start with. - Students must be able to multiply and divide whole numbers by 10, 100 and 1000.
- Ensure that students know the common units well.
Teaching ideas
This link displays the conversions students need to remember. You could display this while students work on the task of memorising the conversions.
Divide the class into four or five groups and run a competition to see who can come up with the most creative ways of remembering the conversions between metric units.
This link displays 30 ‘follow me’ cards for you to print, laminate and cut up. One student starts and reads the question. These cards revise all conversions.
Support – students could use a place value chart to help play the ‘follow me’ game and use digit cards to move the digits along.
Extension – students could play the ‘follow me’ game on a “how fast can we do this?” basis.
- Be quick game on page 209
Divide the class into groups. Winners could play winners. The game needs to be played as quickly as possible for it to be fun.
A good idea is to have one person in the group as the checker of answers. This student will need to be proficient at converting between measures. Or you could be this person yourself if you play the game as a class game.
Teacher notes
- Remind students to check if their answers are sensible.
- You could use equipment such as base 10 materials to represent the units. For example, 1 litre could be represented by a thousands block showing how this “converts” to 1000 small millilitre blocks and so on.
- Encourage students to think about a suitable numeracy strategy to help work out the answers. You could choose some of the problems for them to think, pair and share and then report to the class at the end of the lesson which strategy they decided was
the most efficient.
(Getting started 11)