Year 5/6 Mainstream

Celebrating Learning

World of Maths Incursion:

On Tuesday 25th February, all the Grade 5/6 students participated in a maths incursion called “World of Maths”. Classes took turns heading over to the Multipurpose room where a huge amount of activities were set up around the outside of the room. We were excited to see what it was all about. The person running the incursion told us that they were all problem-solving activities and we were going to have to try and solve them in small groups. We talked about what sort of skills we thought would come in handy for problem solving and came up with ideas like working together, listening to each other, thinking outside the box, trying lots of different ways to solve and persevering even if it’s tricky. Here are some reflections from people as they were trying to solve a puzzle:

“We are doing an activity called Escape where you have chains. When you do the single one you have one loop on your ankle and one loop on your wrist. There’s a knot in the middle and you have to try and get the knot undone without taking the chain off your foot or hand. It’s kind of fun but kind of tricky” 

• Phoenix and Charlotte.

“I did one called Steep Descent. You had to put this metal tube on steps of a ladder that were labelled 1-13, one being the least steep and 13 being the most steep. Then you slid a little roller down the ramp and you had to count how many flashes it took for the roller to get to the bottom. Sometimes when it gets higher it actually takes a bit longer. I thought it would get faster and faster. The activities are fun.” 

• Santiago.

“We played a game called String Along. The aim of the game is to connect all of these tiles with lines on them. You have to use all of the tiles and you can’t use the middle square. It was fun and pretty challenging. We solved one puzzle but we are still trying to figure out the second one”. 

• Lewis, Forest, Sammy, and Lars.

“The Shadows Rule Again was a problem where we had to use a tape measure to use a stick and a power pole’s shadow to find the height of the power pole. We were able to measure the height of the stick, which was 5 meters tall. The stick cast a shadow that was 2 meters long. Because the power pole’s shadows was 20 meters long, we could work out that 10 stick shadows made one power pole shadow, which means that the power pole is 10 times larger than the stick. The power pole was 50 meters tall!”

•  - Alan and Luca

“In the Fire Escape challenge, Mr and Mrs Burns and their children have to go up and down a fire escape using two baskets. They all weigh different amounts. Mr Burns weighs 90kg, Mrs Burns weighs 60kg, and each child weighs 30kg. The challenge was to work out how many times the baskets would have to go up and down to evacuate everyone. The problem was that the difference between the baskets could never be more than 30kg. It was really hard to solve, which we eventually did. It required a lot of trial and error and thinking outside the box. It took 6 trips and required the family to swap and hop on and off the baskets to get everyone down.”

• Rocco, Felix, Reuban.