Chocolate maths

Middle Son always tells me that when he went to school little work was done for the last week, week and a half or even two weeks of term. Now my idea is to work to the bitter end but there has to be a bit of compromise somewhere so when I saw the chocolate unit over at Aventures in Homeschooling, I knew this would keep everyone happy.

There are many helpful ideas on the free chocolate unit study at Homeschool Share including some maths ideas covering different ages. We hope to use some of their ideas, tomorrow, working out the mean, median, mode and range of the numbers of different coloured Smarties in a packet for Middle Son. Excellent revision as he did just this, earlier this term. Mr Exuberance can count Smarties "One, eat one" and Miss Belle can do some addition or may be subtraction might be more accurate.

Today, I thought that Middle Son could do something a little different. I love good, dark chocolate and he loves milk chocolate so he made bar charts of the nutritional content of 100g of both forms of chocolate-I was surprised.

 Of course, the packet didn't tell us about endorphins or micronutrients which would, of course, have given a different result.

Then, Middle Son looked up the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for a child of his age. Using the upper end of  energy recommended, he worked out how many 100g chocolate bars would be needed to provide sufficient energy. This turned out to be 4.3-4.5. Again, using the same chocolate bars as before, he calculated what this would provide in terms of protein, fat and saturated fat-perhaps, not such a surprise.

This is linked to the Hip Homeschool Hop and Living Life intentionally.