Welcome to the first
blog from Mr. Hicks’ 6th Grade math!
Over the past several weeks, we have been representing! Kinda.
An essential skill that must be solidified this year is the ability to
show fractional values, in a variety of different ways. In early October, we started our unit on
ratios. Students were responsible for
knowing that a ratio is chiefly a part to whole comparison. Also, a ratio IS a
fraction. So, a real life example would
be that our class has an 8:24 boy (part)-to-whole ratio.
Our next set of skills was being able to turn
fractions into decimals. We learned
three main strategies to turn fractions into decimals. Please find one of my students and ask for a
demonstration! After this skill was
learned, we spent a little time turning decimals into percents.
Near the end of
October, we applied our new skill sets to some real-life and REAL-FUN
activities! See below:
Our Skittles math
activity was a BLAST! After the students
opened their bags of Skittles, they were to write the flavors as ratios,
fractions, decimals, and percents. My
favorite part was seeing the students applying their estimation skills while creating
beautiful handmade pie graphs.
As a follow-up
activity, we took our data and found two different ways to create pie graphs
with our laptops. One way was to enter
the data into an Excel spreadsheet and then transfer to a graph. We then compared our handmade graph to the
computer graph to analyze how accurate we were.
Finally, we were lucky
enough to have the opportunity to work with some ipads and create a video
tutorial! The students were actually
teaching the unit that they had just learned by using ipad apps and then
editing the video on Movie Maker on their laptops! Although we ran into the usual technical difficulties,
the students learned a ton!
We are now on to
adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions!
