Schoolwide News

It’s almost February, and with a new month comes a new math problem! Squirreling It Away is a problem about squirrels collecting and storing acorns. Let’s see if we can get more adult community members to participate this month than students! All are welcome to submit their solutions using this form, or by emailing me at tcalcagni@eabdf.br.

At the lower levels, this problem invites students to use the four basic operations to make sense of the story. As the levels progress, learners explore more sophisticated ideas: equal groups, multiple ways to combine numbers, and even how to describe patterns and generalizations for any number of acorns. It’s an engaging problem at every level, from our youngest mathematicians to our most advanced.

Last month, we had quite a few participants, despite the holiday interruption. I visited several Lower School classes where we read the story of Stone Soup and then figured out how to scale a recipe to feed larger groups of people. At the higher levels, students converted between different non-standard units of measurement. The problems were tough! If you’d like to check your methods against mine, you can find the solutions key here.

I’m looking forward to exploring Squirreling It Away with you this month. Let’s see if we can get a record number of participants in the Problem of the Month! Feel free to join in, whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, or staff member.