Miss Bailey went shopping for penguin food last week and came into school with 70 tins of the stuff! Apparently they sell it in Sainsbury's.
She had bagged up the food for each penguin in our classroom that we had drawn and ordered the day before according to their height.
The smallest was the Galapagos Penguin (49cm) and the tallest was the Emperor Penguin (115cm). She had assumed that the penguins would eat about as much as they weighed, so she bagged up the tins in groups, but she forgot to label the bags with their names!
It was our job to get them into order. We estimated their weights at first, by becoming human scales and feeling how heavy the bags were, ordering them from lightest to heaviest.
The next day we set about using the scales to test if our estimates were correct.
Our predictions were correct! But then we noticed.....
the heaviest penguins were not necessarily the tallest penguins. We thought about why this may be and decided that some penguins might be wider than others - we hadn't taken this into consideration when we measured and ordered the penguins at the beginning of the week. We thought the bigger penguins might be more greedy, but then we thought that some penguins might need more fat on their bodies depending on where they lived. Perhaps it is colder in some places.
Whilst we were weighing the penguin food, Miss Bailey asked us to estimate the weight of one tin of penguin food. We compared them to the weight of other foods, that have the weight written on them. This way we could make a mathematical prediction.
Our estimates were very close to the actually weight, which we found out was 490g.
We then used our prediction to calculate the total weight of some of the bags. Some of us even started to use the grid method for multiplication.
