Irving Travel Agents

On Monday 3rd Graders from Ms. Milroy's class embarked on the challenging concept of averages.

They are planning a vacation for their clients (5th graders from RWB). Thus far they have interviewed their clients with applicable questions, navigated flight and hotel booking sites (and calculated based on the results), and recorded their work digitally in order to work towards a final presentation for their clients.

This week many students were ready to move on the restaurant/meal planning portion of the project. They were asked to select one restaurant for each meal, find 4-5 items that would appeal to their client, then find the average cost of those items. This would allow them to calculate the daily cost of food and ultimately estimate cost for the duration of the vacation.

In order for students to figure out those numbers we had to understand averages in terms of mean. While exploring averages we also looked at median and mode for a number set. During our shared lesson, students agreed to find the mean, median, and mode for the average number of family members in our group. In order to do this students utilized addition, multiplication, and division. Multi-digit division is new to our 3rd graders for the most part so we approached average mean using partial quotients. We practiced the process and students took notes. We'll continue this work next week.

Some students breezed through this and are on to utilizing decimal multiplication in order to calculate activities and souvenirs. This group of students is incredible at self advocating, expressing their needs for additional instruction, and revisiting previous work to check for accuracy.

5th Grade clients are excited to hear about the vacation plans that their agents are working on!