One day, Debra the math teacher came into Deborah and Jake’s fourth grade and told the fourth graders about a project they were going to work on. Debra called it “the bottle project”. Debra said that you could come up with your own question and solve it with a partner. The brand of the bottles was called NuPure. There was a video and all of the fourth graders watched it, that is how they came up with their questions.

First the fourth graders looked at the video about three times. Some fourth graders would pause the video to count how many bottles are in a case. After they solved the answers to what they need to know they had to figure out how much you need to multiply to get another answer you need. Most of the fourth graders asked how many bottles are in a pallet. The answer was 1,872 because there was 24 bottles in a case and there are 13 packs in a flat and 24×13=312 and then there are 6 flats in a pallet so 312×6=1,872. Some fourth graders had really big questions like two partners named Olivia and Olivia did a question how many bottles are in a wall? They still haven’t got their exact answer yet. They had to solve 1,872×36 they got a different answer than the calculator, the calculator got 67,392 and they got 63,792 or I think 63,972. A lot of fourth graders liked this project.

After the fourth graders finished their projects they showed their posters to the whole class. Another woman came in to the class and videotaped all of us showing our posters. It was fun showing our posters to the whole class. Olivia P hopes we get projects like this one in fifth grade too!

By Olivia Propp