Maths Week

This week we have taken a break from our Topic and concentrated on three days of Maths. Our Maths Intensive focused on measurement.  Our first day was all about understanding attributes and units of measurement. We discussed a power point to get us thinking about the different ways we could measure a mountain: How many giraffes to reach the top of... How many MnMs to fill a crater... How many lavalava to cover.... How long would it take Usain Bolt to run around... and so on. We made our own predictions and suggestions for measuring. We visited the library and saw some scale models. In Room 14 we decided to use Olympus Mons as our mountain to measure. We used equipment and compared Olympus Mons to Mt Everest.

 We had a try at making a scale drawing of our mountain and decided it was a very strange shape. Day Two was when we shared some information about Olympus Mons that we had found out, practised our measurement skills....

and decided the attributes of Olympus Mons we would measure would be the height and width and our unit of measurement would be... Mars bars!
Here we are hard at work on Day Three!

Here is what two of our mathematicians wrote about what we worked out about how many Mars Bars it would take to reach the top of Olympus Mons.

First we measured the length of one mars bar. Our answer was 10cm. We then had to work how many mars bars could fit on one metre (end to end). Our answer was 10. So how many would fit on 1,000 metres. 10,000 was our answer. So how many mars bars for 22 kilometres.(That’s how high Olympus Mons is.) Our answer was 220,000. We checked our work with a calculator. (AM. & S.R.)

Another mathematician wrote:
We measured one big Mars Bar and it was 10cm long. We figured out that 10 Mars Bars=1 metre. We needed 10 000 Mars Bars to make 1Km. So we needed 6 000 000 Mars Bars to make 600 Km. This is how wide Olympus Mons is. It is the tallest mountain in our solar system. (G.S.)