I had students work in groups but at their desks rather than the whiteboards since their work from Friday was still up on the board. It was much harder to see what was going on when students were seated compared to what they would do at the board.
One student said he'd prefer the 40' pool because it was longer. He seemed happy to stop their so I asked if he could find out how much water in the pools. Some groups converted the feet to yards, others the yards to feet. One student wanted to use the formula for surface area but fortunately his group convinced him that he was calculating the wrong thing. All the groups had some good success with this problem.
We then went on to find out how many toonies would fit in the giant toonie. This problem had multiple steps to it and many students struggled with those steps. This reinforced the importance of being organized and methodical. All groups were able to find the volume of the actual coin, after asking for a formula. Determining the volume of the giant coin proved to be a challenge. They had a hard time figuring out that they needed to find the scale factor, then use the scale factor to find the thickness of the giant toonie. There were a few unit conversion errors but all of the groups knew that they needed to divide the volume of the big coin by the volume of the little coin. Of course this assumes that the coin can be packed in (melted down?) without any space for air.
This was a fun problem to watch groups struggle through. They really had to think about what the problem was asking and come up with a plan. Some students were quite frustrated by it, but hopefully this process will get easier for them as we do it more often.
Once we were done we did a quick not on calculating area and perimeter and I gave them some questions to practice.
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