Racing Cars

Winter Inquiry Continued

Our students, particularly the boys, are very interested in toy cars.  Our classroom collection of cars has significantly grown recently, as the students donate their own cars .

   

Based on this interest, Ms. Marrella and I thought we would pose a question to our students and the Wonder Wall for investigation.   Our question asked... Which car will travel the furthest distance in the school hallway and in the snow?

Our fist step in solving this problem was to sort our car collection.  Our first sorting attempt was unsuccessful.  We realized that we needed to use our voice and communicate with each other about putting the same type of car in the same sorting square.  We tried again, and re-sorted our collection. 

      

Our second sorting attempt worked!  We also realized that we needed 9 sorting squares rather than just 6 to sort our collection of cars. 

It wasn't until our cars were sorted that we realized we had a lot of little Hot Wheels cars.  We decided to count and write out the number of each sorted pile. 

Then, we created a graph and interpreted our results.  Our graph showed us that the Hot Wheels, the Zamboni trucks collected from McDonalds, and the large race cars were our largest collection.  We also learned that we had a very small airplane collection.    

We made predictions about which car we
thought would travel the furthest distance.

 It was time to test our cars inside and outside to see which car would travel the furthest distance.  

The winning indoor car!

We found this snow ramp.  We thought it
would be perfect to give our cars a boost!

The winning outdoor car! 

Reflecting Thoughts

Knowing that our students love playing with the car collection, Ms. Marrella and I decided to use them in our Winter Inquiry.  This project required students to sort through our collection of cars.  It was okay that our first sorting attempt didn't work because it gave us an opportunity to re-sort and understand that communication and collaborating with each other is key.  We always knew that we had a large Hot Wheels collection, but it really wan't until the cars were sorted that we saw how large that pile was.  Using one-to-one correspondence we counted each sorted pile of cars and then wrote the number out on pieces of paper.  This activity gave us a chance to practice counting objects one at a time, rather than skipping over a few.  By placing the cars on a graph, our students were given a different perspective of our car collection.  The car graph also gave students a chance to interpret the different columns and cars.  Through the different investigations we have been exploring in our class, our students have become familiar with predicting.  Some students still give predictions without a rationale, while other students are learning to base their predictions on reason (e.g., the monster trucks will travel the furthest because their wheels are bigger).  Racing the cars gave students a chance to cheer on and root for each other.   Though our inquiry on Winter has slowly come to an end (for now), we have sparked a new interest about cars.  Our students have begun to ask questions and are curious about building ramps to fly cars, and the rockets at the back of cars (aka, the exhaust pipes).