Atlantic Canada Mathematics Curriculum Guide

I feel it is very important to have a good understanding of the curriculum guides and outcomes for the province that you are teaching in. These documents are a great resource for teachers and they provide many suggestions as to how to teach the required curriculum. It is for this reason that I had a look through The Atlantic Canada Mathematics Curriculum Guide and choose several activities that they suggested to use when teaching probability for each primary/elementary grade level.

Grade One: Provide an opaque bag and coloured cubes for the student. Ask the student to put 10 cubes in the bag so that red will never be chosen. Have the student repeat the task, this time putting in cubes so that red will always be chosen. Finally, the student repeats the task so that red will sometimes be chosen.

Grade Two: Ask the child to design a spinner so that spinning red is more likely than spinning green, but spinning red is less likely than spinning yellow.

Grade Three: Ask pairs of students to think of what might happen about half the time when a die is rolled. Students should experiment with the die, record outcomes, and later present their findings to classmates.

Grade Four: Teachers could have students station themselves within or near the school, where they can see passing cars. They record the colours of the first 10 cars they see. They then describe the probability that a passing car will be blue. They might then explain why they might get a different probability the next time they perform the experiment, and check to see if they do.

Grade Five: Tell the student that you rolled a pair of dice 25 times and the sum of the numbers was 8 on 4 of the rolls. Ask: What is the experimental probability that the sum is 8? Does that seem reasonable?

Grade Six: Tell students that a particular baseball player has an average of .250, i.e., he gets 1 hit in 4 times at bat, on average. Ask them to conduct a simulation to determine the probability that the player will get a hit each time at bat in a particular game. [This can be simulated by creating a spinner with four equal sections, one of which is labelled ‘hit’ and the other three labelled ‘miss’. Spin the spinner 4 times recording each outcome (batting average) and repeat several times.]

Thanks!