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The Herald, Tuesday, October 23, 1977 Page ?

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TERRACE-KITIMAT

daily

herald

. SECOND

SECTION

Student

YL. t teacher Tim Dyer gi

See on

Josiane Cam and Lesile Rozsas discuss the price

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veg the troops some last minute instru

care

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of Rycriap.

IN THE MARKET PLACE

clons. |

Students learn metric

‘By DON SCHAFFER Herakl Staff Writer Shoppers in the Overwaitea store in Terrace watched in-

credulously as a grou at

grade 7 students

carts up and dewn the alsles, argued about best buys and frantically calculated prices Friday afternoon.

The trip was organized by Bob Middleton, a grade 7 teacher at Thornhill Elementary School, and two student teachers, Tim Dyer and Ramona Langton, as the

touch of a unit on metric weights and Mthe trip c] was stipe vised by Middleton, Dyer, Langton and Christine Eide, the student teachers’ supervisor on the Simbn Fraser University’s teacher- training program.

Middleton - explained that the trip was done at the end of the metrics unit, not so much as a test of the student's ability to make calculations based on the weights and volumes of the products, but as a way of getting the children some practical experience in the marketplace.

“We wanted to make the material we have been covering meaningful to the students, to show them what a kilogram weighs and how much a litre is,” Middleton said. "Hopefully they will understand the relationships between the volumes and weights better than they would have had they just done

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the classroom work.”

They certainly found cut how heavy three iltres of cooking oil was. Two girls were passing the botile around amazed at its weight.

The students were not simply turned loose in the store. They were split up into groups of three or four and given question sheets, with problems of conversions and com- parisons between smaller and larger products. They were asked which is abetter buy, brand X ata certain weight or brand Y ata different weight, and similar questions.

“Some of those questions are really tough," Dyer explained. “They aren’t simply being asked to do the math, they also have to make judgements based on the information they get from doing the questions correctly.”

Besides the school- work aspect, the children learned something about how the marketplace works, They discovered, for instance, that a

potentially have been a

disastrous field trip, with the students released at random in a super-

‘market. The class was

well ‘working all the time, with

grocery store is divided:

into sections, where products of similar uses are put together. They also learned that the atore makes It easier for them to pick which products they want by placing signs underneath or over top of mer- chandise in order to explain its cost, or if it is on special.

It also showed the student teachers something about the way students will act if given direction and structured assignment in what could

behaven and a minimum of fooling around, . Part of this success came from theimarking arrangement. Half of the marks were on how well the calculations were performed, the other half on the group’s behavior. - Individual students who may have played around were held in line by other group members who didn’t want to lose marks because of someone else, In this, they learned about the value of teamwork in ae: complishing a set task. As far as_ the Measurable results, the scores on the assignment, were concerned, the trip wags very successful. One team got a perfect score on the questionnaire, and on the bonus question. The groups were behaved and very in- terested in what they were doing, (o the. point that it was very hard to distract most of them. The students also came away from the trip more

cost-conscious con- sumers. They were amazed to find that the small jars of Cheez-whiz were less expensive per weight than the large jars, and several ex- pressed dismay that the large economy size wasn't a better buy after - They learned = to calculate the cost of the products they looked at, but Middleton admitted that the assumption of the “better buy” was based on totally on cost, not taking into account quality of the items ob- served.

Eide was impressed with the way the students learned, and with the way that her students handled the class. She expressed satisfaction with the organization and execution of the trip, and was very pleased with the idea behind it.

“It really does make the classwork more meaningful for the students if they can be shown that it is useful,” she said. “It's also good if the students can get away from the classroom every once in a while to par- ticipate in something worthwhile.”'

evening bus fo Prince half hour earller, at 5:

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