Monday, October 12, 2015

Columbus Day And Donuts on a String (Real World Math)



If you're just waking up to realize today is Columbus Day, don't worry, BrainPop has you covered.  Their feature (meaning free) film for the day is on Christopher Columbus, and strikes a nice balance between celebrating the accomplishments of his discoveries, and discussing the controversies of his actions.

We celebrated the day with a donuts on a string challenge for breakfast...


...which has less to do with Columbus Day (or Canadian Thanksgiving - which we'll be celebrating later in the day with a Peanuts inspired popcorn and pretzel lunch) so much as knocking another fall tradition off our leaf list.


But, here's a real world math problem for you from our morning to yours:

Given eight foot monkey bars, and children from four to six feet tall...


...what is the average length of string needed, to loop through donuts and tie to the monkey bars...


...in order to give each child a donut hanging at a challenging, but still reachable height...



...to be eaten with no hands (given that the teenagers in the group will inevitably pull the donuts off and eat them by hand after the first few attempts at a bite)?



Happy Columbus Day!

6 comments:

Ticia said...

I should try this with my kids sometime and see how they do with it.

Phyllis said...

Happy Columbus day and happy thanksgiving!

Anonymous said...

Looks like so much fun! I totally missed it this year with the move and tried to go to the post office!!

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

Happy Columbus Day! I can't believe how tall everyone is getting!

claireshomeeducation said...

We do doughnuts on a string for the girls birthday, but our children are obviously waaaay more competitive than yours because there is a lot of cheating and trying to destroy opponents chances of winning. Your children look a lot more civilized! It's all done in jest though and is enormous fun!

MaryAnne said...

Ah teenagers...