Sunday 7 June 2015

Volume and Capacity!

Over the past two weeks, Year One have been learning about volume and capacity. We began our learning of capacity by guessing how many jellybeans were in the jellybean jar for the Mini Vinnies guessing competition. See our guesses below! The actual amount was 700!


We read a very funny story called how many jellybeans and discussed the chance of different events occurring using the book as a stimulus. We were imagining that we had 100,000 jellybeans! We discovered that it was certain to pull out a jellybean, it was likely to pick a grape flavoured jellybean since grape had the most, it was unlikely to pick out a lemon jellybean since there was only 1 and it would be impossible to do lots of crazy things like pick out a smartie or a banana or even a shoe since there aren't any of those things in our imaginary jellybean jar!


Then the task for Year One was to measure the capacity of their own jellybean jars. We used lots of different equipment and created our success criteria to ensure that we were measuring accurately. See our success criteria and photos of our measuring below.

Many students found that the items within the classroom weren't the best materials to use as they didn't fill the containers completely and left lots of gaps. So it was decided that we go to the sandpit and measure the capacity of our containers in scoops of sand so that there wouldn't be any gaps.

Our next task was to compare and order the capacity of our containers. We began by using the materials within the classroom and the students knew that they should use the same materials to compare and order capacity but they were limited by the materials available within the classroom. We discovered that an efficient way to order capacity was to tip the contents of one container into the second container. So we went back to the sandpit and used sand and water to compare. Some students were even able to compare how many times larger one container was than another container.


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