Monday, April 8, 2013

Comparing Water and Land on the Earth

Today we started our unit for Common Core Standard RI.3.3 - Describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect.

I decided to create a unit that revolved around Earth Day since that is coming up soon.

We started with a scientific and mathematical exploration of how much land and water there is on the Earth.  To simulate this, I threw an inflatable globe for the students to catch.  They had to tell me where their thumbs landed, on the land or on water.


A student then kept a tally of the results on our new Smart Board.  (YES! I am super exicted - we just got it two weeks ago, so I no longer have Smart Board envy!).

After a few rounds, I had them make predictions about how many times it would land on each if we threw it 100 times. I needed to remind a few that their totals needed to equal 100 - a fun little mini-math lesson! We continued on and finished with the results below:
I let them look at the globe and answer how close their predictions were, and why they thought we came up with the results that we did. 




Here were some responses:






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