Alien Math

Alien Math
This year in fifth grade math skills will be tested in Ms. McMillion’s math class and her class has taken a turn into outer space. Mrs. Slodounik has introduced Alien Math to Ms. McMillions class. Alien Math is a mathematical adventure taking place in the far reaches of galaxies. The main point of Alien Math is to teach students to use more than base 10. The main character of Alien Math is an astronaut who is traveling to different planets trying to save Earth from becoming a hyperspace traffic lane. Each new planet the astronaut travels to has a different base. Some of the aliens in this story are the Binarians using base 2, the Hexadecimites using base sixteen and many other alien species. Each new alien species has a different body and way of counting. The Binarians have two heads on one body (but to them they have ten heads)! The Binarians count like this 0,1,10,11,100,101..., the hexadecimites use numbers and letters to count and they have sixteen arms (10 to them)! Another alien species uses the base six system and they count like this 0,1,2,3,4,5,10,11,12.....! This experience has opened the mind of children to do more challenging math. 
By Jackson


Alien Math Celebration
     In 5M math, we do a fun alien math. When we finish the Alien math unit, we decided to celebrate. On November 5th, we had our party. We all wore light neon colors like aliens. First, we listened to a news broadcast that talked about the thought that there might be aliens on 22% of the planets. Next, we did a bingo game that we called ALIEN (instead of BINGO). Mrs. Slodounik said a number in base 2 and we converted to base 10 to see if we can put a spaceship on a space, for example, N 10110. It then got too hard so we thought to just say the number. Then once someone got "ALIEN" we all got plow pops. As we did this we had glow sticks to represent the glowing nature of aliens and outer space. We finished with Suduko and some people shared strategies to help up get started. When we had to leave, everyone was upset because we LOVE Alien Math!    
By Sam