HOW MANY GRAHAM CRACKERS?

Each week we do a math challenge called a Three Act Task.  It's an out of the box thinking problem where we have to synthesize a lot of different math skills to answer a question.  The cool thing about a Three Act Task is we get little bits of information in three different doses and we get to do some wondering, come up with a question, figure out what more information we need to answer the question, and then give solving it a try.  We all approach problems differently and it's fun to see how many different ways we can arrive at one solution. 

Graham Cracker (Act 1) from Graham Fletcher on Vimeo.

What did you notice about the video?  What are you left wondering?  What should we try to figure out.  As a class we decided we wanted to know: HOW MANY GRAHAM CRACKERS ARE IN THE BOX?  How many big ones?  How many little ones?  After all, if we were to share them fairly with the class we would need to know how many we had to work with.  But, we needed a little more information to figure it out...was the box full, how many sleeves are in the box, how many little graham crackers are in a big graham cracker?  Here's some more information.

Graham Cracker (Act 2) from Graham Fletcher on Vimeo.

And finally...the reveal!  We all arrived at the answer a different way, but it was so cool to work through this real life problem and challenge ourselves with some out of the box thinking!