Blanton & Kaput modify the Christmas carol The Twelve Days of Christmas for an algebraic reasoning task befitting the season:
How many gifts did your true love receive on each day? If the song was titled “The Twenty-Five Days of Christmas,” how many gifts would your true love receive on the twenty-fifth day? How many total gifts did she or he receive on the first two days? The first three days? The first four days? How many gifts did she or he receive on all twelve days?
“The X Days of Christmas.” I like it.
12 Comments
Dan Meyer
December 3, 2014 - 1:02 pm -Alternate take: Math ruins Christmas.
Justin Lanier
December 3, 2014 - 1:12 pm -Allow me to submit “partridge numbers”, a lovely geometric problem type in the spirit of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.
http://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/papers/partridge.pdf
MaryAnn Moore
December 3, 2014 - 3:07 pm -I love this! I’m going to give this task to my 8th graders in a couple days. I’ll write about it and let you know how it goes.
Cathy Yenca
December 3, 2014 - 4:33 pm -Ha! I used to have 7th graders calculate the number of gifts each day, the total number of gifts at the end of the 12 days… and even write and perform (in costume) cheesy “Math Carols” (think, Ge-o-me-tree Ge-o-me-tree! to the tune of Oh Christmas Tree! It was very, very corny!)
I have never thought of the “x” days of Christmas extension. I like it too.
Kevin Hall
December 3, 2014 - 6:32 pm -Have you read the children’s board book Hippos Go Berzerk? If you read it to the last page, it offers a similar moment: “One hippo, alone once more, misses the other 44.”
http://www.amazon.com/Hippos-Go-Berserk-Sandra-Boynton/dp/0689808186
ixsi
December 3, 2014 - 9:37 pm -Also have a look at this comic from SpikedMath with a nice visualisation of the “12 days of Christmas”: http://spikedmath.com/471.html
Xavier
December 3, 2014 - 11:59 pm -Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem, a classical problem.
Louisa
December 4, 2014 - 6:08 am -For those teaching in classrooms with students who celebrate holidays other than xmas, you can do this same problem with Hanukkah candles lit and burned all the way down over the 8 (or more!) days. In the past, I have let the students pick between the two problems.
Julie
December 4, 2014 - 6:27 am -There is a great lesson by Hallie Foster that was published in the CMC Communicator back in September 2011. I don’t have a link but would be happy to send it to anyone who is interested.
Ste
December 4, 2014 - 6:36 am -I worked out an estimate of the cost of love, not a very open ended task, but did promote a certain amount of discussion.
See it here: http://secondarymaths.wikispaces.com/Number
Steve Ransom
December 4, 2014 - 7:43 am -@Dan – I love your comment. I used to do this with my 4th graders and it was interesting to see which students crumbled and which ones persisted. Not everyone loves the “challenge”.
Pete Spencer
December 5, 2014 - 1:31 pm -Vi Hart (whom I love) made this video a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxnX5_LbBDU
I sometimes play it to my (UK Year 4) maths group at the end of term, and then we can chat about all sorts of fun maths; they love it!