field trip and grade 6 math

I love field trips with the older kids.  Sure I like the kindergarden trips too, I've been on more than my fair share of little kid farm trips.  But the field trips get more interesting as the kids get bigger.

A field trip that combined math, playground and splashing in a fountain...Kyle loved it

 

Today was a trip with Kyle's grade 6 class, a math trail outside.  That sounded right up my alley, I took plenty of math courses at university, surely I could handle grade 6 math (you can see where this is going, right?).

We started out on the trail with a few bits of information, easy enough.  Then onto a plaque and the calculating of what day of the week July 1 fell on in 1984.  Not too bad, calculate the years, add in a few extra days for the leap years, divide by 7 to get the remainder, easy peasy.  We had a few other easy ones with a chessboard and the angles on the roof of the gazebo.  Then we got to the playground and the questions got tougher like calculate the different combinations in one row of the tic tac toe game.  Do you know what's worse than not knowing the answer?  Thinking you do know the answer and having your son point out it is actually 2 to the power 3 which is 8 (i.e. pointing out you are wrong).  Wow, do they take away your degree if you lose too much of your education?  Because I really should have had that one off the top of my head, I'll blame it on the constant keeping track of 6 wandering boys.

After that things got interesting.  Do you know there are 362,880 possible combinations of x's and o's on the tic tac toe board?  Of course not all of them are possible game solutions (phfft, of course not, I knew that).  How many are possible game solutions?  How many are winning game solutions?  I HAVE NO IDEA!  Moving on...next up was calculating the volume of the oddly shaped garbage can, I was happy to hand the clipboard, measuring tape and calculator off to the kids for that one (by this point I wasn't fooling anyone, the kids knew I had no idea). 

We ended with a little scavenger hunt for specific types of numbers and shapes (you know easy things like prime numbers and shapes with 8 symmetrical axes), estimating how many cars will fit into a parking lot, measuring a railing to see if it's up to code and plotting bicycle racks on a cartesian plane.  I gotta tell you, I don't think I could pass grade 6 math. 

It was a great morning though, despite some light rain the kids had a blast being outside and it was great seeing them all run around the playground having fun and later splashing in the fountain.  I'll end this with the most interesting tidbit I learned today...an emirp is a prime that gives a different prime when you reverse its digits, for example 13 & 31.  Today I may have discovered I'm not nearly the math geek I used to be, but I still find it interesting.