Real-World Math Projects for Gifted Learners, Grades 4-5

Mark Hess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000532326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Helping bring mathematics and engineering to life, these challenging lessons give teachers an exciting tool for engaging advanced learners through creativity and hands-on products. Units are driven by standards and invite students to become baseball field architects, create flying jellyfish, make a gnome hat parachute, scale skyscrapers, and more! Each project includes step-by-step lesson plans with reproducible templates, time estimates, and a materials list. While centered on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) competencies, true to real-world experiences, these hands-on projects span the curriculum—including writing and public speaking—and while they suit entire classrooms and smaller groups, they can also be easily adapted to individual projects for independent study and home school.

Unit 1 The Jellyfish Flier

DOI: 10.4324/9781003257646-2

Background

Our jellyfish fliers work really well, and they look just like their namesakes! My students had so much fun with this STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) challenge across the curriculum with an emphasis on math.

This unit will challenge students with math applications in engineering and design tasks—perhaps in ways they have never been challenged before. Not only is the unit an outstanding way to stretch a student’s abilities, but it also offers unique cross-curricular tasks.

Success will require your students bring together challenging calculations, geometry, engineering, graphic design, and technical drawing—with a little research and writing thrown in to boot.

Some of your students will readily adapt to these tasks depending upon their skill sets and the development of their executive functioning skills. Let’s not forget that gifted learners come in unique and infinite varieties. Although it will be important to lend appropriate support to some students, it will be equally important to allow others to proceed at a quicker pace. One of the advantages of this differentiated approach is that students who are working more quickly will also be producing examples of products for students working at a slower pace.

Preparation Notes

Working through this unit as if you were a student is an excellent (and fun) way to prepare—especially if you are not experienced with drafting and technical drawing. You’ll experience some of the same frustrations the students experience and generate many of the same questions in your own mind. Feeling a little frustrated? That’s OK too! You will be better prepared to urge the students to work through any feelings of frustrations they have, to be resilient, and not to let perfectionism rule their emotions. The most important lessons in gifted and talented units may be the social and emotional ones. This unit is designed to stretch and challenge students, and this process necessarily requires a bit of discomfort. Those little icky feelings we get inside are how we know we are learning something new and challenging.

Unit Objective

The student will:

• Understand ratios and scale and apply them to technical drawing tasks.
• Use geometry to solve real-world math problems.
• Apply an understanding of surface area to three-dimensional shapes.
• Understand ways math can be applied to a real-world design and product development task.

Active Common Core Math Standards

All Common Core State Standards throughout this work are © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.G.A.1

Find the area of right triangles, other triangles, special quadrilaterals, and polygons by composing into rectangles or decomposing into triangles and other shapes; apply these techniques in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.G.A.3

Draw polygons in the coordinate plane given coordinates for the vertices; use coordinates to find the length of a side joining points with the same first coordinate or the same second coordinate. Apply these techniques in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.SP.B.4

Display numerical data in plots on a number line, including dot plots, histograms, and box plots.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.SP.B.5

Summarize numerical data sets in relation to their context, such as by:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.SP.B.5.A

Reporting the number of observations.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.SP.B.5.B

Describing the nature of the attribute under investigation, including how it was measured and its units of measurement.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.SP.B.5.C

Giving quantitative measures of center (median and/or mean) and variability (inter-quartile range and/or mean absolute deviation), as well as describing any overall pattern and any striking deviations from the overall pattern with reference to the context in which the data were gathered.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.SP.B.5.D

Relating the choice of measures of center and variability to the shape of the data distribution and the context in which the data were gathered.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.RP.A.3

Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems, e.g., by reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double number line diagrams, or equations.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.7.G.A.1

Solve problems involving scale drawings of geometric figures, including computing actual lengths and areas from a scale drawing and reproducing a scale drawing at a different scale.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.7.G.B.4

Know the formulas for the area and circumference of a circle and use them to solve problems; give an informal derivation of the relationship between the circumference and area of a circle.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.7.G.B.6

Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, volume and surface area of two- and three-dimensional objects composed of triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons, cubes, and right prisms.

Launch

The Giant Jellyfish Invasion Mystery

Engage the students’ natural sense of curiosity with the first section of the “The Giant Jellyfish Invasion Mystery” located online at www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/09/16/the_giant_jellyfish_invasion_mystery.html.

This article is especially good for us because it contains challenging vocabulary for upper elementary, and in a read-aloud, gifted learners will be challenged to synthesize the meaning. Stop and answer questions as they arise.

Read aloud only the first two sections of the article (to the section titled “Ancient creatures”), and project the photos onto a screen if you have that capability. The photos alone are pretty amazing! Allow students to comment freely on what they see and hear, and you may follow up with some of the following critical thinking questions:

• The first paragraph opens, “The gelatinous masses on the deck of the Myoho-maru could charitably be described as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Jellyfish Flier
• 2 Pikes Peak Math
• 3 Baseball Field Landscape Architects
• 4 Cones and Gnome Hat Parachutes
• 5 Nametag Math Project
• 6 Scaling Skyscrapers