Sledding is one of the oldest winter games: people have slid down snowy hills on wooden toboggans for hundreds of years, and today there are plastic sleds, round saucers and blown-up snow tubes too. A good sledding hill has a long, flat place at the bottom where sleds can slow down and stop. How far a sled goes depends on the hill, the snow and the sled itself.
Six pages from a day on the sledding hill. On page 1 sleds stop along the flat at the bottom of a little hill, and children read a number line marked every 5 feet to say how far each went, then compare. Page 2 is a big hill marked every 10 feet up to 500, with the runs to put in order from longest to shortest. On page 3 each sled has two runs: add them in columns to find how far it went in all, and subtract to find how much longer one run was. Page 4 is speed as counting on: a saucer that goes 5 feet each second has gone 5, 10, 15 feet, and children fill in the table for four sleds. Page 5 is race times in seconds, where the fastest sled takes the fewest seconds, with a bar graph to finish. Page 6 has six word problems. The first problem on each page is a worked example.
Before page 1, mark a number line on the floor with tape every 5 steps and slide a toy car or a paper sled along it: where did it stop? Page 4 needs no multiplying, only counting on, so it suits 2nd grade; 3rd graders can check the last column with multiplication. Pages 3 and 6 use addition and subtraction within 1,000, with and without regrouping.
Next time you go sledding, count your steps from the bottom of the hill to where your sled stopped, and see whose run went farthest. Time a few runs by counting seconds together and talk about which run was the fastest.
This pack supports the following Common Core State Standards for Mathematics:
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Measurement and data from a day of sledding, with sleds, toboggans, snow tubes and saucers racing down a snowy hill. Students read how far each sled went on a number line in feet, add and compare runs, count on by a sled's speed in feet each second, graph race times and solve sledding word problems.
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