P Y5 Wheel of fortune new

This lesson provides ākonga with a playful context to investigate the fairness of spinners through a chance-based investigation. Ākonga explore what fairness means by comparing fair and unfair chance events, investigating a series of spinners and connecting their fractions knowledge with spinner design. They discover that a spinner is fair when each colour covers an equivalent fraction of the circle, meaning every outcome is equally likely.

This activity explores the following key ideas:

• engage in chance-based investigations, including those with not equally likely outcomes, by:
  • posing an investigative question 
  • anticipating and then identifying possible outcomes for the investigative question
  • generating all possible ways to get each outcome (a theoretical approach), or undertaking a probability experiment and recording the occurrences of each outcome
  • creating data visualisations for possible outcomes
  • describing what these visualisations show
  • finding probabilities as fractions
  • answering the investigative question
  • reflecting on anticipated outcomes

Resources

• Teaching materials for Wheel of Fortune
• Coins and half full water bottles with lids for flipping
• A class set of pencils, paper clips and spinners
• Stiff paper or light card
• Felt tips
• Rulers, protractors
• A fractions wall, or other manipulatives for comparing equivalent fractions