Week Fourteen – Problem solving

Goal
- Practice problem solving in a collaborative manner
- Try to have a fun Math week before Christmas break
Delivery
- This week will be all random groups of three at vertical surfaces. For consolidation,
praise creative solutions and look for connections between concepts.

Day one – husband wife dishes dilemma

Goal
- Probability
Delivery
- I have these friends, they’re a married couple (give them names). They hate doing the
dishes. Both of them just despise the idea of cleaning plates or pots and pans. So their
dishes pile up in their kitchen. It was actually starting to cause them a lot of stress so the
wife decided to come up with a plan. She took a bag and put three marbles inside;
o Two are green,
o One is yellow
- She made him a deal, “She will pull out two marbles at the same time. If they are the
same colour, she does the dishes. If they are different colour, he does the dishes.”
o Should he take the deal?
- Extension
o If you decide it’s unfair, come up with a marble system that is fair.
Teacher Notes
- Almost everyone can figure out that the first deal is unfair. They almost always go to 2
green and 2 yellow will be fair. The challenge is in proving fairness,
- This is another great guess and test question where they can just play with numbers and
ideas. Failure in this question becomes very common and you should bring this up in
consolidation

Day two – Revisit the window problem from earlier in the year
Watch how much better kids become at noticing after doing it for nearly four months

Day three – Tax Person

Goal
- Prime and composite numbers
Subordinated tasks
- Factors and multiples
- Operations practice
Delivery
- Let’s play a game called Tax Person (it was originally called Tax Man until a student –
rightly- challenged me on this. Anyone can collect taxes)
- On the boards, write the numbers 1 – 12. Tell students each of these numbers is a cheque
for that amount. The goal is to get more money than the tax collector, but there are rules:
o Any time you take a cheque, the tax collector MUST get a cheque.
o Any cheques that are left over belong to the tax collector, so make sure you try
not to leave any on the table (or the whiteboard).
 You are being intentionally vague here, they are going to figure out how
you take cheques (when they take a number, you take any cheque that
is a factor of that number)
o They will almost always take 12 first.
 Cross it out and take 6, 2, 4, 3, and 1
 I usually create a t-table to keep track of who has each cheque.
 After I take so many, I ask students to think about which numbers I
just chose, and why I chose them.
 They will take 11 next, but tell them they can’t, because it doesn’t allow
you to take money (1 is gone)
 They will take 10, you take 5, try to take 2 and 1, but they are already
gone, I usually say that out loud.
 They will try to take nine, tell them they can’t because 3 and 1 are gone
 8 – no because 4 2 and 1 are gone
 Hopefully kids start to see how the game works here,
 Go through other numbers, tally up the score. Offer to play someone else.
Remind them what happened after the last kid took 12 first.
 Play again and do a quick consolidation after you defeat them (because
you will) where a student explains the rules. Give some examples and
send them off to develop a strategy where they defeat the tax person.
- Extensions
o Numbers from 1 – 20
o Numbers from 1 – 30, or 36

Day Four - Square Cake, Five People

Delivery
- Mrs. O’Leary makes the greatest cakes. When we first moved here, we wanted to bake a
cake to celebrate our arrival, but we didn’t want to dig through boxes to find a cake pan,
so we went to the store and bought a new one. The only one they had was a perfect
square cake pan, so that became a family thing: square cakes. One of the best parts of the
cake is the icing. It’s buttercream and it’s perfect. Like eating delicious clouds of sugar.
There are four us in the family, so the square cake is perfect because it’s easy for
everyone to get equal cake and equal icing. (draw a square on the board, have a kid come
up and divide the cake so everyone can have equal cake and icing). So we have this great
system and it always works. But last week, Mrs. O’Leary made a cake and before we cut
it into quarters, she went to work and told her friend Reema about it. Reema was like,
“you always tell us about these cakes. I want some. And I want equal cake and equal
icing. I’m coming over tonight, let’s make it happen.”
- How did we cut the cake so that all five of us got equal cake and equal icing?