Summary:

Chewing bubble gum is not only encouraged in Cindy Hermida's class in The Canyon View Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, it is required. Her 25 eight- and nine-year-old students see who can blow a bubble in 20 seconds or less, as part of establishing a fictitious contest for a fictitious bubble gum company. This introduces a lesson in which her students collect (from all third-graders in the school), use a number line and discussion to analyze results, and draw conclusions. Students are engaged by the real-world fun of chewing gum, and the challenge presented by the teacher helps motivate them to interview and evaluate fellow students. By lesson's end, students are able to find regularities in results by using repeated reasoning, and Ms. Hermida helps them see that all probabilities will always be less than 1.

Standard Connection:

(Practice Standard)—The Common Core Practice Standard #1—Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them—is best represented in this clip. It is apparent that students understood the problem and persevered with the task because they were, with little adult guidance or supervision, able to go to other third grade classrooms to explain the task and conduct their survey. Sense-making also was demonstrated as children participated in representing their data on a line plot. The ultimate test of sense-making will be demonstrated when students analyze their data and draw conclusions to send to the make-believe company's president.

(Content Standard)—The domain that captures the mathematics content that these bubble blowers are learning is—Measurement and Data. Students can use timepieces that measure time in seconds. They can display a data set of measurements in fractions of a unit on line plots. They can "use operations on fractions to solve problems presented in line plots." Specifically, students in this class can answer questions about bubble gum blowing probabilities using line plot data.

Questions to Consider:

What pre-requisite skills did these third-graders need to succeed in this lesson? Explain the role communication played in this mathematics lesson. How is discourse (i.e. reading, writing, listening, speaking, acting out, etc.) built into it? What rubric might you create to evaluate students' results?

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them

5.MD Measurement and Data