Walnut Racing and a Kenyan Meal - a message about the week from our 3rd/4th grade teacher

We finished last week with an authentic Kenyan meal as a part of our study that included reading about and learning about the culture of that country. As usual, the Expeditioners were completely interested in helping and tasting the unusual food, even though it had unusual textures and flavors. We will be coordinating a Zoom or FaceTime meeting with my son, who is currently in Kenya, to learn about differences between our everyday experiences and life there.

Math this week featured a lot of new content, and everyone has truly stepped up to a new level in terms of their math thinking. We worked on adding fractions and simplifying the answers, including mixed numbers. That work will continue for the remainder of the year. We have also added a few new math games to our diet: “Outnumbered” and “Speed” are recent favorites.

As a former scientist and science teacher, I am most proud of their group experiment, which stemmed from the “Walnut Racing League” that the students invented last week! We did a controlled experiment to study the rolling behavior of walnuts. We then calculated descriptive statistics, including the mean, median, range, and mode of their walnuts’ rolled distances. Finally, they made their most “intense” (their words!) graph of the data so far.