With the beginning of a new calendar year, we've been reviewing calendar skills and practicing how to use calendars. One of the skills we need to practice is relating units of time to each other.
As we were discussing the new year, we started writing down how long 2013 is in other units of time. For example, we knew 2013 was equal to 12 months, 1 year and 365 days. We didn't know how many weeks were in a year, but with some clues from Mrs. Braybrook and careful guessing, we found out it's 52 weeks.
Then, one of the us suggested trying to figure out how many hours were in a year! We knew it would be a lot, and that you would have to multiply 365 (because that's how many days there are in a year) by 24 (because that's how many hours are in a day). However, no one had any idea how to figure it out...and so the "teachable moment" presented itself! Mrs. Braybrook showed us how to write the equation and figure it out. It really wasn't so hard, because we already know how to figure out multiplication basic facts using skip counting and thinking about equal groups. Doing that big multiplication equation is just putting together a whole bunch of basic facts! Here you can see how we recorded our thinking...
THEN...someone suggested we find out how many minutes are in the whole year! Yikes! That would be a lot! Mrs. Braybrook said we didn't have time to figure that one out, but she challenged us to try it on our own (or with help from our parents).
Can you figure out how many minutes there are in a year? How would you show your thinking?
that sounds hard!
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scott