Divide and rule!

We've thought lots about our clock flowers. We've talked about multiplying, about factors, about prime numbers. It was time to mention division too. So we each chose one of the factors and literally divided the clock up into slices of that number of minutes.

 

Factors of sixty

After making a giant sixty-factor thing with Cuisenaire rods on Monday, Gabrielle, Marie and Rose were determined to make their own record of what they'd created. We had to stick some squared paper sheets together to make it big enough. They've added a few lines of rods of lengths we don't actually have, giving them new colours!

(Girls, I tidied it up a tiny bit, and turned it on its side so that it fits on the page!)

Can you see, there are still some factors of sixty missing? Do you know what they are?

How did there come to be sixty seconds in a minute, and sixty minutes in an hour? Apparently, it goes back a long way. Have a look at this video:

More clock flowers

We used the Scratch Clock Flower Project and noticed lots of things - have a look at our comments.
Then we together looked at which size jump "fitted", so that the jumps only went round once to create nice neat petals.

We scanned them and coloured them in quickly on Paint:

Meanwhile, Rose, Marie and Gabrielle volunteered to try a similar thing with Cuisenaire rods. Their line of rods had to be 60 long. Only numbers that "fitted" exactly into sixty could be added.

They did a great job. The line at the top is the twelves, made of ten+two because we don't have any twelve rods. Can you see any other big factors of sixty that are missing?

Clock Flowers on Scratch

After some class work on clock flowers last week, I wrote a little bit of code on Scratch to make some more. You can make "petals" for the flower that have jumps of between 1 and 22. Try it out. Click the green flag to begin.


What do you notice?
What do you wonder?

Clock Flowers

We've been looking at time on analogue and digital clocks this week in Year 4, so we also did some clock counting, where, like the minutes on a clock, once you get to 59 you go back to zero again. It's a kind of round number line.

We looked at different sizes of jumps you could have going round the clock. The jumps look like petals on a flower, so we called them clock flowers. We all chose different sizes of jumps, drew them out, and then had a look to see...

What do I notice?

Mr Gregg asked Justus if his line would visit every mark around the clock. Justus saw from the vertical pattern in what he'd drawn that all the numbers would be included.

That's some great noticing!
Here's a slideshow of some of our work:


(If you'd like to have a go, here's a link to the Word document we used.)

Fizz Buzz

Playing Fizz Buzz on the pitch after assembly:

Multiples of three, multiples of five

These last two week's we've been looking at patterns in the multiples of three. We spotted quite a few in this hundred square:

Rose and Holly spotted how the numbers in any one diagonal (almost) all have the same total if you add up the digits. Alya spotted that the number of coloured squares in the diagonals are in a pattern.

We have a hundred square in our playground too. Here's 4G being the three and five times table:

We've been playing a game called Fizz Buzz!

Just the three times table is Fizz:

Add in the five times table and you've got Fizz Buzz:

Have you tried playing it at home? How did it go?