Yesterday during our monthly staff meeting, teachers completed a fun math activity that I thought I would share with my Gr3 class today (with a little bit of my own Minecraft twist).
I told students that while I was playing Minecraft, I found this mysterious pyramid like structure. Their math challenge, as Minecraft Mathematicians, was to find clever ways to count the blocks without tearing the blocks apart. Students were given a representation of the structure in cubes to work with. Representing the Minecraft Mystery Pyramid in cubes
A student arranging the block, looking for ways to count the structure without resorting to counting by 1s.
Students found 4 main strategies for adding the cubes up: -T charts -Adding by 10s then 5 -Skip counting by 5s -Multiplication Using a t-chart to help solve the problem:
Solving with addition: Solving with multiplication: |