5/6C’s Class Blog 2008

Or should that heading be “Another Visitor Kilometrestone”? Maybe milestones never went metric!

Today, October 2, our visitor counter ticked over to 11,111, or eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven.  That’s a lot of visitors! Our counter began on January 2, so it’s been counting for 9 months or 265 days. That means we get, on average, 42 visitors each day! Wow!

Here are some facts about 11,111:

• it’s a palindrome
• it has at least 4 factors (1, 41, 271, 11111) so it’s composite.
• it ends in 1, so it’s odd
• if you square it, the answer is 123,454,321 (another palindrome)

Can you find any other interesting facts about 11,111?

In the first week of September our school took part in some activities to mark National Literacy and Numeracy week in Australian schools. The festivities began on Monday with a games afternoon outside. We played all kinds of games that honed our English and maths skills – Scrabble and Boggle were favorites of the senior students.

Then we took part in the coin toss activity. We threw 20 cent pieces at a target from distances of 1m, 1.5m and 2m, and tallied the results. It was much harder than we thought it would be to get the coin to stop on the target – many of them hit the bullseye but then rolled away!

The results of the nation-wide activity are now in – you can see them all here. It seems many schools had similar results to ours!

Image: prufrock27 on Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution Licence

In maths we have been looking at 3D shapes. This week we made some models using, as we call them, cubithings; then we drew our models on isometric line paper and shaded the drawings. We’re pretty pleased with our results. Here are two examples for you to admire; the top one is Cointha’s work and the other one is Darianne’s.   

We’ve been exploring large numbers, noting how they become much easier to read when you put them in groups of three. But if you want to know how to read and write really big numbers, this Math Cats site is a great resource! From this I discovered that after the ones group, the following groups of three digits are, in order, the following:

• thousand, million, billion
• trillion, quadrillion, quintillion
• sextillion, septillion, octillion
• nonillion, decillion, undecillion
• duodecillion, tredecillion, quattuordecillion
• quindecillion, sexdecillion. septendecillion
• octodecillion, novemdecillion, vigintillion
• unvigintillion, duovigintillion, trevigintillion
• quattuorvigintillion, quinvigintillion (and yes, it goes on further!)

So, 98,765,432,101,234,567,890,987,654,321,014,872,589,369,096,385,

274,109,876,543,210,123,456,789,015,907,530

can be read as: ninety-eight quinvigintillion, seven hundred sixty-five quattuorvigintillion, four hundred thirty-two trevigintillion, one hundred one duovigintillion, two hundred thirty-four unvigintillion, five hundred sixty-seven vigintillion, eight hundred ninety novemdecillion, nine hundred eighty-seven octodecillion, six hundred fifty-four septendecillion, three hundred twenty-one sexdecillion, fourteen quindecillion, eight hundred seventy-two quattuordecillion, five hundred eighty-nine tredecillion, three hundred sixty-nine duodecillion, ninety-six undecillion, three hundred eighty-five decillion, two hundred seventy-four nonillion, one hundred nine octillion, eight hundred seventy-six septillion, five hundred forty-three sextillion, two hundred ten quintillion, one hundred twenty-three quadrillion, four hundred fifty-six trillion, seven hundred eighty-nine billion, fifteen million, nine hundred seven thousand, five hundred and thirty.

 Can you read these numbers?

•  981,564,987,258,654,957,153
• 6,547,845,528,812,585
• 678,558,426,423,168,746,585,468,742,337

Here’s another site about big numbers, the MegaPenny Project. Check out the pictures of a million pennies (US one cent coins) and the 1,000,000 cows!

It’s only been ten days since the “lucky” date, 08/08/08. Today, we made it to 8888 hits on our blog!  Ooooh, coincidence? Perhaps… or not. Post your thoughts.

We’ve been busy having meetings with students, their parents and Mrs C, looking at what would be appropriate learning goals to aim for by the end of the year. All students showed that they are able to identify an appropriate goal which will help them to develop their skills and learn better.
A common focus for many of our class members was to become fluent at their times tables. To do this, they will need to learn every fact by heart. When we broke this task down together, we found this wasn’t as hard as it may have seemed – in fact, many students had only about 20 equations to learn to achieve this goal! We’ll report back on our progress soon.

Image made with Wordle.

Recently we used Excel to make pie graphs of how we spend a normal school day. Firstly, we had to keep a tally sheet of how we used each hour of the day. Then we combined similar activities so that we didn’t have too many categories; this way our graph would be clear and easier to compare with the graphs of other class members. Once we had our category titles and hours, we put the information into an Excel spreadsheet and used the chart wizard to turn our data into a pie graph. Finally we got to play around with formatting options – it was interesting how all of our graphs started looking the same but ended up looking unique!

Finally, we converted our graphs into JPEG files using Paint, and we uploaded them to individual blogs. Here’s Robert’s work:

 Our poll showed that games are high on our readers’ list of things they want to see on our blog. Ask and you will receive: Click here to play! . This challenge is fun! Use the equipment given to make the ball land in the cup. And no cheating (not mentioning any names, Jarrod!)

More games can be found on our blogroll to the right and on our Learning Links page. Enjoy! Please post a comment to tell us what you think of these games, and to recommend any other child and education-friendly sites.