Problem solving!

This week we received two very large scrolls of paper…after carefully unravelling them we discovered that the giant from our class story needed our help! He had heard how good we were at solving problems from the Fairy Godmother and The Big Bad Wolf.

The first scroll we received said something very odd. The giant thought that his arm span was the same length as his height! We didn’t believe him. After discussing what the giant meant by arm span we were quite convinced that he must have got his facts wrong. There was no way his arm span could measure as long as the enormous giant’s height…surely?

After contemplating an expedition up to the top of the beanstalk ourselves we determined that we didn’t actually have the giant’s address and didn’t want to knock on the door of the wrong castle by mistake. And as Xander pointed out we certainly didn’t have a long enough tape to measure him!

Zoe had a brilliant idea, she suggested that we measured ourselves to see if our arm spans were they same as our height!

We realised that it would be incredibly hard to measure ourselves so Ethan suggested that we ‘’work in teams’’. At first we all wanted a turn to be measured but quickly understood that it had to be the same person who was being measured otherwise our results wouldn’t work out.

We practised by measuring Thomas (who lay very still J), we discovered that to measure our arm span our arms had to be very straight and that is was much easier if everyone in the team had a separate job. One person held the paper still, one cut and the others made sure the paper was straight.

We were very careful measurers and were able to see if our arm spans were the same as our heights by placing our two strips of paper very carefully next to each other.

It turns out that all of our heights are slightly longer than our arm spans. So the giant was nearly right.

Ethan had another brilliant idea …’’but we are just children, we should measure you Miss Sullivan, you are nearly giant sized!!.’’

‘’Or Mr Chapman’’ said Erin!

Perhaps we will ask him next week J