NASHVILLE CELEBRATES
NATIONAL LITERACY AND NUMERACY WEEK 2008

Background: The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers has been conducting Reach for the Stars as part of National Literacy and Numeracy Week since 2003. Previous investigations have explored our height and the size of our feet (2003 and 2007), how we travel to school (2004), the features of "Money Trails" and the minting dates of circulating Australian coins (2005), and a series of balloon relays (2006)!
The common theme is one of classes collecting data locally, submitting their results to a national data collection via the Internet, and exploring their own findings as well as a summary of the data collected by participants from across Australia.
The activities have involved more than 50,000 students each year. In 2007, data was reported by 76,862 participants in 506 schools, and many teachers and schools now make Reach for the Stars a regular element of their participation in National Literacy and Numeracy Week.

Reach for the Stars 2008: As part of our celebration of National Literacy and Numeracy Week, students at Nashville have taken part in the Reach for the Stars nation-wide mathematics activity. The activity involved students taking part in an experiment to investigate where coins land when thrown onto a target under various conditons.

Each class from Prep to Year 7 took part in this investigation. During the activities, students analysed situations, posed questions and used mathematical language to develop arguments. Students then reflected on their findings in order to justify predictions and explain outcomes.