Warm up today was from again Would You Rather Math.
We looked up how many litres were in a gallon from Google. They went to the boards to finish off their choice. Some coaching was needed with most groups to decide how to use the conversion. I found myself using my hands to show why multiplication makes sense if we are converting the litres to gallons. I put up my hand to say
“I’m holding 1 gallon…how many litres is this? Now here in my other hand I have two gallons…how many litres?”
“Mr. Orr, that’s too much now. We only want to 1.85 gallons.”
“Ok, say i had 1.5 gallons?”
“I’d multiply by 1.5″ ….”so I should multiply by 1.85!!”
And for some groups who were converting the litres to gallons I also demonstrated using my hands. I pretended I had cups that held 3.785L and scooped some water out of the 5.62L bucket….how many times can I do this? The students seemed to grasp that they would divide here!
For the remainder of class we revisited our trip to San Francisco. We looked at travelling by bus and travelling by train. Students filled out the sheet researching websites like Greyhound, Amtrak, and Google Maps.
