OUR MATH TRAILS PROJECT

GAREHIME ELEMENTARY

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

 

 

We are the fifth grade class of Mrs. Sears (student teacher) and Mrs. Mercer at Garehime Elementary School located in Northwest Las Vegas, Nevada. We are proud of our school and our neighborhood. We found three math trails projects in and around our school.

 

Project #1

We wanted to find out how much ground each light pole needed to cover to light up the whole park area at night. We found this problem when we were trying to play football at night. One player threw the ball and hit another player in the head because it was too dark to see. These are the steps we used to solve the problem:

 

First we measured the park’s width and length: 100’ by 200’

Next we multiplied the numbers to get the area of the field:

20,000 square feet

Then we found out how much ground each light covered (there were 8 light poles) by dividing 20,000 by 8 = 2,500 square feet

Next we multiplied 2,500 by 8 to get how much area the lights covered

This amount, equaled 16,000 square feet. But we had a total of 20,000 square feet to cover.

We took 20,000 - 16,000 which gave us 4,000 more square feet to cover the whole field. So we divided 8 into 4,000 to get 500. This meant the light poles needed another 500 square feet of coverage to light up the whole field.

 

 

Project #2

 

We wanted to know how much fencing it would take to refence the tennis court at the park. First we measured the tennis court to find its perimeter. It was 120’ by 116’ plus 6 corners at 7’ each.

120+120+116+116+42= 514’ of fencing would be the amount needed to refence the tennis court.

 

 

 

 

Project #3

 

We wanted to know how the art teacher (the designer) figured out how many tiles would fit into the mural of our school’s namesake, Edith Garehime. It is located in our school’s front hallway.

 

 

First we measured the length and width of the mural: 7’5” by 8’4”

Then we changed this into all inches: 89” by 100”.

Next we found the area of the mural by multiplying: 8900 square inches

Then we measured the size of the tiles: 11” by 16”

We found the area of the tiles by multiplying: 176 square inches

Then we divided 176 into 8900 to see how many tiles were needed: 50.5 tiles would fit into the mural.

 

 

 

 

We hope you enjoyed our projects!