Who doesn’t like mixing food with learning? Today we investigated how many M&M’s we thought were in one bag using a scale to weigh in grams. As a whole class, we inquired into how the scale works, playing with it’s functions. Next, I drew popsicle sticks to determine groups of four students to work together to reach a conclusion of how many candies there were. The group got to pick either a crispy bag of m&m’s or a regular bag of m&ms to experiment with. The rules were simple: use any strategy you want to figure out how many m&m’s are in the bag. Yes, you can open the bag and use the m&m’s but no, you cannot count the m&m’s one by one, you must somehow use the scale.

Hint: Look at the back to figure out what the total weight of the package is.

The results for this lesson were varied. Many students got frustrated since when they weighed only one m&m the scale weighed 0kg but when they weighed two m&m’s it sometimes weighed 2kg. Regardless, the students had fun, used teamwork, developed skills on how to use a scale, and were creative in their approaches to get reasonable results whether or not they were totally accurate.