Changing Schools in Long Beach
(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Fall 1996)
back to "Of Penguins and
Problem Solving"
Sandi Machit had her students write letters to future 6th graders describing
how to do some part of the Sea World project. The letters are not only
useful tools for next year's students, they allow Machit to judge how well
students have learned their math lessons and they help students prepare
for similar assignments on state and district "performance" tests.
Here's one letter:
Letter for Future 6th Graders
Dear 6th Grader,
You are about to begin a long project which involved tons of thinking and
tons of work. The first thing you have to do is create a life-sized drawing
of one animal that your group decides on. Don't worry though, I'm going
to give you some hints and suggestions.
My main hint is to make a unit ratio of the animal's size on paper, over
the actual animal's size. Now that you have a unit ratio you know that a
certain amount of cm. is equal to a larger amount of cm. which is part of
the actual size. Now you make the graph paper. You can either glue a whole
bunch of cm. paper onto a large sheet of paper, or you can convert the cm.
to the size needed. Here's my hint on how to do that: look in your agenda.
After you have it converned you can just draw it using your unit ratio.
Good luck!
Scott Kazan