Probability, Education Week Mass and My Weight on Mercury

Today in our morning class we started learning a little about probability. We watched a short video from Khan Academy about what probability is, and briefly discussed the difference between experimental probability and theoretical probability. We talked about flipping a coin as a simple example. If I flip a coin once, my chance of getting heads is 1 out of 2, or 1/2. If we flip the coin ten times, we would expect to get heads 5 times. That is the theoretical probability, or what we would expect. I we actually flip the coin, however, we might get 7 tails and only 3 heads instead. The outcome gives us the experimental probability. We will be exploring this more in our lesson tomorrow - the Rock, Paper, Scissors Challenge.

Our block was very short this morning so that we could get ready to go to Mass at St. Patrick's. During Mass we sat with Madame Lepage's kindergarten students. The grade 6's were excellent helpers and did an excellent job of setting a good example during mass.

For Science, we took up the worksheets from Friday, and then used some of the information on them to figure out our weight on the different planets. The information on the sheet gave us our weight as a fraction of that on earth. We had to multiply the fraction by our own weight to determine our weight on other planets. Since we have not learned how to multiply fractions, I reminded students to convert the fraction into a decimal and then multiply that. For example, we learned that to find 2/5, we can figure out 2 divided by 5, then multiply our weight. Next in science we will be learning about the characteristics of systems, before going more in depth about the solar system itself.

Here is a blendspace unit for probability to assist students in practicing concepts we will be learning in this unit.