Friday, April 21, 2017

Energy Saving Graph with Weekend Linky

Welcome to my weekend blog hop -
Make My Saturday Sweet #218!


Do You Use Free Online Education for Your Kids?

It's been a while since I accessed free online educational sites for Amanda. Then, about a month ago, I heard of an excellent online educational site for kids called Education.com. It has different activities for Math and Reading from Pre-K to Grade 5. There is a free membership option and a couple of paid options, which are explained on the Description and Pricing page.

Amanda's favorite subject at school is Math. Education.com has colorful games and coloring multiplication worksheets to teach math in an engaging, low-stress manner that generates excitement. Check out the Math Resources page and see for yourself!

I was given a free activity to try at home with Amanda. It's a Household Energy Consumption Activity for Grade 3 that teaches Math using Data Collecting, Multiplication, and Graphing.

Here's the introduction that grabbed my attention:

Chances are, you find yourself saying it to your kids all the time: "Turn off the lights!" As energy costs rise and households continue to look for more ways to cut back, why not involve your third grader, too? Here's an activity that gives your third grader a chance to pull out her addition and multiplication skills to help your whole family take a good look at what those lights really do use up. Then, challenge your third grader to use the data to create bar graphs. What does it take to make those numbers go down?

The activity had guidelines and steps to follow, but seemed to be missing some nuts and bolts. I had to do research online to find out some necessary information. I also decided to change the activity to suit us better. You can follow our version below.

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What is a Watt?


A Kilowatt Hour (kWh) is a unit for measuring energy. This is what you pay for when you buy energy from the local utility company. It is, as its name suggests, one kilowatt of power used over a period of one hour. A light bulb is typically 60 watts; leave it on for an hour and you have used 60 watt hours, or .06 kWh. Source: Blog Homebug

To explain this concept to Amanda, I compared the idea of measuring energy to a ruler for measuring length. Amanda took the example further and compared it to a clock measuring time. Now she knows that we can measure energy too!

We are no longer using the standard 60 Watt bulbs in our house. South Africans have changed over to the energy saving 11 Watt bulbs. Amanda went around the house counting all of our lights and then we did the comparisons. I let her work out the math with a calculator when she needed one and I asked her word sum questions, so that she had to think the steps through herself.

The cost of electricity in our activity is in South African rands. You can go online and find out what it costs in your area.

This is what we concluded:

60 Watt Light Bulb
4 hours a day
30 cents a day
22 light bulbs about R7 a day
22 light bulbs about R50 a week

11 Watt Light Bulb
4 hours a day
.06 cents a day
22 light bulbs about R1.50 a day
22 light bulbs about R10 a week

How much money do we save a week?
R40



In the graph we used centimeters. Our biggest number was R50 a week, so we measured 25cm as our longest line (every half a cm equals R1). Hubby helped us with the graph. Overall, it was a good learning experience for all of us.

Disclosure: I was given the free activity, which is free for everyone, and this is my honest opinion.


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Make My Saturday Sweet is a weekend blog hop for all family friendly blogs. You are welcome to link your favorite post from the past week(s) and to visit the last link before yours and leave a sweet comment. It's a really easy and fun way to make new friends and to catch up on old acquaintances.

Now on to my blog hop...

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1 comments:

  1. This seems like such an engaging activity. Your girl is very bright to make the comparison to a clock measuring time. Thanks for sharing at #fridayfrivolity! Xx

    ReplyDelete

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