Probability Dessert
Goal: To learn about everyday probability
Materials: Manipulatives, such as unifix cubes, basket to draw the manipulatives from
How to play: When Penny finishes her meal she gets desert. How much dessert she gets, however, depends on what color of cube she selects! We put one blue cube, one black cube, and eight yellow cubes into a basket. She then closes her eyes and draws for desert. A yellow cube equals one dessert (one sucker, for instance) a blue cube equals double the dessert, and a black cube equals – gulp! – no dessert.
I like this game because it works math into an everyday situation: dessert time. My hope is that Penny learns, first, the idea of what it means to say that something is more or less likely than some other event. My second hope is that the language of probability (likely, chance, probability) starts to mean something more to her than just some word she might have a vague notion of. Most of the time before she draws I have her go to the whiteboard and she will write down the fraction that represents the chance she will draw a certain color (1/10 for a blue cube, for example). She is still learning how that written fraction relates to her chances of drawing double desert, but we’re getting there. The thrill of drawing makes the whole desert-time activity fun and exciting. The one time she has drawn a black cube, I ended up giving her some dessert, since she did eat all of her meal. No need to make desert time traumatic!
After Penny has gotten a little more facile with the idea of this probability game, I will start to track what she draws. Then we can look at the chart or graph that shows that, indeed, the yellow cubes are drawn more often than the blue or black cubes. We can then relate that back to the Math Mountain game (where we recorded dice rolls and graphed the result) and see if we can spot any common themes between the two.
Certainly the intermediate goal of all this is to help Penny have that Eureka! moment, when she applies what she’s learning at home to something she sees while we’re out and about. This will show that she can apply the information, rather than simply regurgitate what I’m telling her, and will also show that she sees how these math games relate to a much broader world out there.
As an aside, the other day I was out with Penny and we were talking about some things we noticed in a Target store. When I was about mid-sentence, she blurted out, “that’s just probability you’re talking about.” A passer-by couldn’t help but stop and ask, “did that little girl just say “probability?”
Well, yes, she did, but my response would be that she’s not any more or less smart than your children. I just choose to spend a lot of time with her talking about these type of topics. It’s not hot housing, it’s not stultifying, and it’s not damaging in any way. Rather, like all children her age, Penny is a sponge, is driven to learn new information, and has an intense curiosity about nearly everything. Instead of filling her head with the latest Michael Jackson funeral proceedings or People magazine, why not fill her head with great books, deep concepts and grand ideas? Why not sow these seeds now, so that they sprout as she starts Kindergarten this fall and throughout her life in school and beyond. If she wrestles at this age with tough problems, deep issues and curious facts, those same things will be second nature to her when she’s called upon to bring her ideas to the table.
