The Math in a Garden

This week I tried a new experiment.  The experiment was to show the students a picture, have them ask questions about it, and develop a word problem from the picture.  Of course, the first thing the students said about this picture was, "this is an overgrown garden with lots of weeds."  Yes, it is, but it DID produce a lot of great vegetables this summer!

Once we got past how the garden looked, the students commented that the garden was L-shaped and that it was built up with two boards.  We talked about the process of building the garden and we came to wonder how many bags of soil it would take to fill this garden and how much it would cost.  The students quickly realized we needed to know the volume of the garden so we calculated that.  Then I had pulled up two different bags of soil from the Home Depot website.  Because I had measured the garden in feet, we saw that the bag labeled 40 lbs was not going to be helpful for us at this moment.  Therefore, we took the 1.5 cubic foot bag and calculated that we would need 70 bags of soil and that it would cost a lot of money!

After solving the problem, we then wrote out what we did and presto, we had a word problem!  The point I made to them...life IS one big word problem!  This was a wonderful, engaging activity and I hope to do more like this throughout the year.  If you have any pictures, that provoke a math question, send them my way.  I would love to look at them and develop a math problem from it!