Fraction Fruit Drinks

I have been horribly remiss in keeping up with my poor little blog lately - put it down to reports, end of term frenzy, piles of unending administration stuff...

...but no more!

I am now on holiday for two long blissful weeks and can share some fun projects that we have been doing over the past couple of weeks in school.

Our topic this term was Rainforests and we had an amazing International Primary Curriculum unit that we used. I absolutely loved it - and am thrilled that we'll be adopting the IPC officially next year. I've already been scoping out all the awesome units that are available and thinking about what to do!!

One of the fun projects we had to do this term was have the students create their own fruit drink recipe using rainforest products. We tied it into our Math lessons and had them create Fraction Fruit Drinks!!

First we assembled all our products:

mango, pineapple, papaya, bananas, oranges, vanilla yoghurt, pineapple juice, papaya juice, cinnamon and ginger - plus bowls and measuring cups. Oh, and a blender and jugs!

The kids were given instructions: They had to have 1/2 cup of vanilla yoghurt, 1 cup of liquid and 2 cups of fruit in their recipe. The fruit had to be divided into 1 cup of quarters and 1 cup of thirds.

They were able to decide what amounts they wanted to have of each fruit and we practiced some addition of fractions before we started so they all knew exactly what to do.

e.g. They could choose 1/4 cup of mango, 2/4 cup pineapple, 1/4 cup of papaya for one of their cups. Or they could choose 2/4 and 2/4 or 1/4 and 3/4 etc. 

They could only use each fruit once but didn't have to use all of them if they didn't want to. Everyone had to have the yoghurt and the liquid though. :)

Once each team of four students had designed their drink they measured it out.

Then we blended. They added their yoghurt, liquid and any spices during the blending process.

As each drink was blended I scurried down to the staffroom and poured the drink into a labeled jug. The kids couldn't see which drink went into each jug. :)

When all the recipes were concocted we did a blind taste test of each drink and rated them according to what we thought. The choices were Excellent, Okay and Disgusting. (There were a few Disgustings, I'm sorry to say :) but for the most part the kids liked their concoctions)

With the voting concluded we tallied our results and then I told my class which mystery drink was their group's.

As you can see, Drink B or Gold Swirling Passion was our winner! 

One of my students was absolutely outraged that she had voted her "very own drink" as being Disgusting - which just proves that our blind taste test worked. :)

We graphed our results and the winning drink was served to the parents at our Rainforest Cafe at the end of term. 

Of course the parents had to do a little work too - they had to guess the ingredients and the proportions of the mystery drink. Sadly, no-one got it all right but my generous kiddies awarded their parents with housemarks anyway. :)

This was such a fun project and I think it helped my class see a practical application to Math.