The Problematized Situation

“My friend, the Kindy teacher is planning lots of Christmas crafts for her children. She found this picture of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on Pinterest and she wants each of her students to make one as a Christmas decoration.”

“She has to order the craft paper strips and wants help working out how much to order. She wants the diameter of each loop to be 10 cms so wants to know how much for each reindeer and how much altogether for her group of 15 children.

She has also worked out that she can fit a pair of antlers into a 12 by 10 cm rectangle. The roll of brown paper is 60 cms wide. How much brown paper will she need to have?”

Teaching notes

Note: this problem is definitely for the Year 5, 6 and 7 students. I suggest you use our STAR model to unpack and work through this problem the following questions/suggestions might help:

	What is the problem about? What important information are we given? How many strips are needed for each model? What are we being asked to find out? What will the answer to each part tell us?
	How can you work out how long each strip needs to be? What operation will you use to work out how many centimetres for 8 strips? What strategy could you use for working out how much brown paper will be needed?
	Provide hands on materials such as paper strips, large sheets of butcher’s paper, grid paper etc so that students can actually make the model and check their ideas if they want to. Allow time for experimentation and double checking to prove their answers.
	Select two or three strategies for each part of the problem and review what was mathematically powerful in each of them.

Remember there is a lot to be learned from sharing and talking about an unfinished or inaccurate solution especially in a classroom where students know that the star of the lesson is not the one that got the right answer but the one who enabled lots of learning.

As we get time, we will add more Christmas problems. We hope you and your students will enjoy them!