Friday, March 09, 2012

Weekly Class Summary: Mar. 5-9

SOLs Covered: 6.16 & 7.9 Probability
Math Dictionary Sections: (24) Probability
Upcoming Assessments: WWU Quiz 10 (Tues. 3/13)

During a very bizarre weather week that provided us with a snow day closing on Monday and a summery day on Thursday (and just about everything in between every other day), we continued working with probability. The students rudimentary knowledge of some of the basic probability concepts that were moved down to fifth grade math were very rusty, so we reviewed the basics while throwing in little chunks of the more complex sixth grade probability concepts.

One of the fifth grade parts of this week's lesson entailed creating tree diagrams (aka probability trees) to see all the possible outcomes or available choices (aka sample space) for various given scenarios. We used the trees to determine the total number of possible outcomes for each situation and then to determine the possibilities (aka probability) of different events occurring. I showed them how this compares to the "sixth grade way" of working probability questions using the basic counting principle (aka BCP, aka the fundamental counting principle) to determine the total number of possible outcomes and the formula for independent events to determine the probability of a given event.



The students also went over many sample scenarios trying to determine whether two events were independent of each other or dependent on each other. We have started calculating the theoretical probability of both independent and dependent events, but we will explore this further next week. We ended this week with a basic probability quiz covering singular events (more fifth grade review), probability trees, and the basic counting principle. The more complex sixth grade questions will be on the next WWU spiral review quiz.



This week's winners in the Homework Stingray Point competition!



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