Homework Fun...

Do you ever get sick of doing homework? That's how I felt today! I was having a hard time focusing on my homework and I kept getting distracted! Some of the problems took a long time which made it worse! haha. I even had to watch videos to help me. I didn't even know there were videos! 
One problem that I didn't know how to start asked to estimate the total amount of deer in a game preserve. It said that a forest ranger caught 250 deer, tagged them, and released them. Later 105 deer were caught and only 36 of those were tagged. Estimate how many deer there are total in the preserve. Well I was stumped! I had to watch a video, but I figured it out! 
You have to set up a proportion. On one side of the equal sign you take the total number of marked deer caught over the total number of marked deer which was (36/250). For the other side of the proportion, you take the number of deer caught over the number of total deer in the reserve which was (105/x).  So the problem now looks like:
36/250=105/x

Then you have to solve for 'x' by cross multiplying. So you get:
36x=26250

Then you divide by 36 on both sides to find 'x'. 
x=729.166667  which rounds to about 729 total deer in the preserve.

So the problem stumped me at first, but once I knew how to set up the problem, it was a piece of cake! Most of the problems are like that, I just need to figure out the first step!


This LINK will help you understand better by walking you through a 'fish pond' example step by step! Or click HERE for an experiment to go with it (More interactive and fun looking) (It is a PDF download).

Homework: Piece of cake (for now)

Today I tackled my first homework assignment on probability. It surprisingly was really easy! It wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. Most of it was basic probability. For example, one problem stated, "A marble is selected at random from a jar containing 3 red marbles, 6 yellow marbles, and 4 green marbles. What is the probability that the marble is either red or green?" So to solve this you take the probability of getting a red marble (3/13) and add it to the probability of getting a green marble (4/13). The answer is 7/13! Most of the homework was as easy as this one. There were some harder problems, but I figured them out. The tricky part was learning how to decide if you add or multiply probabilities. When the question is asking for an "or" you should add and when it asks for an "and" you should multiply. Sometime you have to do both, but that is in the next homework section/chapter! More fun ahead!

I was searching the internet for ways to teach probability to my students and I came across this website full of worksheets I could give to my students to practice. It has answer sheets to all of the worksheets and it has different scenarios using probability, including using marbles and spinners! Click HERE to view!