The Game of Chance

The goal of this curriculum unit is to develop students’ understanding of probability and chance. It is designed to develop the students’ vocabulary related to probability, and allow students to become comfortable with talking about chance events. It will introduce many probability expressions such as sure, certain, probably, 50-50 chance, not likely, impossible, and others. In addition, the students will explore how probability affects various situations by performing probability experiments,and they will learn to represent the data from chance events explorations in graphs and tables. Through continual use of this vocabulary in explorations, the students will progressively make them part of their repertoire. Students will be able to:

1. Make informal comparisons between the chances of various outcomes of an event.
2. Make predictions by comparing the likelihood of two possible outcomes.
3. Explore equally likely outcome events through experimentation.

This unit is intended to complement the School District of Philadelphia’s pre-existing curriculum Everyday Math. The allotted time for this unit is 15 days spread throughout the year. Its audience is third grade students in a low to mid-income urban neighborhood.