Tracking Trash

As part of our Earth Day studies, we collected all the litter on our school grounds for four days. We worked in pairs, using tally marks to count the trash and sort it into 5 categories (cigarette butts, drink packages, food containers and waste, school items like pencils, and kid's stuff like broken toys). Next we added up our 4-day results, using calculators to check our answers.

Finally we added all our results together to get a class total, by using a computer spreadsheet. We made a spreadsheet chart to show our results. We made big posters for the totals of each category and presented our results to the whole school at an assembly. We had collected 2541 pieces of garbage and found that food wrappers and waste were the worst offenders! We decided that our school could do better!

Lemonade Stand

I really think math is everywhere. Over the summer I enjoy selling lemonade with my friends. To have a lemonade stand you need to use a lot of math. The fist place where we use math is at the store when we have to figure out how much is each lemon, the cubes of sugar, the ice cubes and the cups. Most of the time we need to figure out the unit price in order to spend less money. we buy the amount of material according to the weather. The weather plays a big role in our small business because we change the price of per cup according to weather.

For example, if is really hot outside we use more ice and we have to raise the prices, and if is not too hot we lower the amount of ice and sell the cups of lemonade cheaper, but we have to watch that we also earn a profit. As you can see we use math in the store, we use math according to weather, we use math to figure out the price of each cup of lemonade, we use math to figure out our profit, we use math everywhere.

Math in Baseball

I really like baseball. When you look at the fielding percentage, on-base percentage, ERA, and batting average. Those things are all statistics, fractions and decimals. You get the fielding percentage by dividing the amounts of times you field the ball correctly by the amounts of times you tried to field the ball. An example is jack Wilson tried to field the ball 10 times and he made 1 error, so his fielding percentage would be 900. The on-base percentage is calculated the same way except you divide the amounts of plate appearances by how many times you got on base.

Coney Island's Sundial

One of the best things about summer in New York is going to the beach! More than anything, I love going to Coney Island — I can play in the sand and ocean all day, and then go on the rides! My Mom doesn't let me wear my watch to the beach, because it'll get wet and might get lost. But, I still want to know what time it is, to see how much time I have left on the beach. So, I found a way to tell time without a watch! Here's what I do:

Truth's Garden

My mom showed me how to use math while we garden. First we measured our plot, 6 feet by 8 feet. Then I told mom the perimeter, which is 28 feet. Then mom showed me how to make a graph to see how many plants we could fit in our little garden. Some vegetables like broccoli, need their own square foot of space. Other vegetables, like carrot seeds, have to be planted to a certain deepness in the soil. No more than a half inch. Then my mom and I use a ruler to make sure that the seedlings are thinned to 2 inches apart. That makes me sad to thin our garden. I hide the things we pull by the back deck for the baby woodchucks to eat.