Class #56--7th Age Math

Monday, May 16, 2011, 11:25 A.M. 7th Age Math Class. Class #56 on my “50 Classes or Bust!” journey. As I walk in to Mrs. Crawford’s classroom, the students are diligently working on a four-minute addition “frenzy” worksheet. Yes, the age-old math facts sheets are alive and well at Calvert! As the students finish, Mrs. Crawford gives them their completion time to record. The class is studying fractions, and it happens to be Skittles day today! Each student receives a bag, which is quickly torn open and then sorted into five different categories, based on flavor. The students have to answer multiple questions, such as: how many Skittles are in the bag? What fraction are lime? What fraction are grape and orange? (And yes, the fractions will change if the students start to eat the inventory!). Mrs. Crawford enters the data into a spreadsheet, which is then projected onto a whiteboard. It was surprising to me to see such variances among the Skittles bags. For example, one bag had only four lemon pieces while another had twelve; another had seven grapes while a classmate’s had nineteen. This is an excellent activity, as the students have to demonstrate facility with numerators and denominators in an enjoyable, hand-on format. The pupils keep working hard; they also have to determine the fraction of classmates wearing a certain color shirt (yellow, white, or blue), as well as the fraction wearing jumpers. Next, the boys and girls design their “fraction” bedroom on a sheet of graph paper. They draw various pieces of furniture and indicate the appropriate fraction it represents in terms of the total space in the bedroom. Bravo to Mrs. Crawford and her students for a great class!