Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock

by Gracia, Justus, Anabel, Lucia and Noah

Flat Anansi

Rodrigo, Alonso, James and Samyak have written their own Anansi story:

Anansi and the Magic Berry

An Anansi story by Aditi, Rose and Marie:

Anansi Goes to Lunch

A story retold and illustrated by Gabrielle, Noémie, Annie and Alya.

Jumping frogs

We've been playing the game of Frogs.

The frogs can move into a space either by sliding to the next lilly pad or by jumping over the one frog next to them. You can play the game on the app below:

Full Screen and tablet version

We found the minimum number of moves necessary. We used desmos.com to make a graph of this. 

We looked at the points for 1, 2 and 3 frogs of each colour, and then estimated where the one for 4 frogs would be.

Samyak spotten a pattern in the numbers:

"You add odd numbers!"

Click on the image below to see the graph on desmos.com.

How old?

Today we remembered the time Mr Gregg asked, “There are 25 chairs and 5 tables in the classroom. How old is the teacher?”

It made Gracia ask this question to Mr Gregg:

Which came first?

In 4G we looked back at some of the big questions we'd asked before:

We picked, Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Someone...

Someone, who didn't really want to talk about it too much, or have his photo taken, has just won the singles and doubles under-eleven ping pong championship for Midi Pyrenées. You can't really see that person because of the cups he's holding in this picture.

Solitaire

We've been looking at the game of solitaire. 

You can get all different shaped boards.

Lots of us managed to get it down to just one counter left. Gabby was a bit of an expert!

Have a game online!

Aeroscopia

We had an exciting morning visiting Aeroscopia, the aviation museum near Blagnac.

The museum is a huge space filled with planes and helicopters including a Super Guppy! And there is a large collection of scale models.

For most of us, the most exciting thing was entering inside the concord and an Airbus A300B. The Concord was very long and narrow with tiny windows and a very small door, Mr. Gregg had to duck to go inside! Most of the inside space was full of machinery so we think that it was a test plane. Inside the A300B part of the floor was glass, so we could see through to the lower level where the luggage would be stored.

Here is a slide show of our fun day:

One of our activities was to sketch an MS760.

Here is a slide show of our wonderful sketches:

Towers of Hanoi

We've been investigating the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Usually this is done with disks.

But we used Cuisenaire rods.

We started with just three rods.
The aim is to move a whole pile of rods, but in a certain way. Bigger rods can never be on top of smaller ones. You can only move the top rod in the pile. You can never put a big rod on top of a small one. You can only have one pile in a circle.


The challenge was, not just to do the puzzle, but to be able to find a way to write down what we had done. We found lots of different ways:

Then we moved onto four rods:

Some of us shared our ways with the whole class.

It was interesting to look at the pattern in the minimum number of moves necessary for different sized piles of rods at the start:

Here's a slideshow:

PS The next day Rod brought in his own Towers of Hanoi:

 We also returned to that doubling series (called "powers of two" - but we don't need to remember that, do we). Some of us kept on doubling for quite a while...

And we went the other way too: halving. We halved a circle: ½  ¼  ⅛...

Anansi and the Tug of War

Here's an Anansi story:


Look how Derren Brown uses the same trick:

Three Cats Three Dogs

There are 3 cats and 3 dogs, arranged like this:


Neighbouring pairs can swap.

How many swaps to sort them?

 

We used counters to investigate.