Chicken Nuggets or the Egg McMuffin Dilemma
A butterfly flaps his wings and the next thing you know the trees are blown down. I forgot to brush my teeth last night and now I have 7 cavities. The moon’s gravitational pull just spilled my coffee allover the place. Helium is lighter than air, it makes balloons float. When Walter the neighbourhood cat is frightened, he arches his back and fluffs his tail.
Cause and Effect is essential to reading comprehension as it forces us to think about the ‘WHAT’ and the ‘WHY’. In the cause and effect relationship, the cause is the WHY and the effect is the WHAT.
Study the movie clip below and complete the rolling text box:
We start to learn about cause and effect when we are babies. Developing cause and effect is important as a baby because you learn that your behaviour and actions result in a response. Can you think of a cause and effect relationship that a baby would learn early on?
It is human nature to ask, “why?” and “how?”
We want to know how we got sick so we can better prevent it from happening in the future. Why did our brother/sister get a new toy because we want one too! We want to know how much money we will save over the long term if we buy a hybrid car.
These examples identify only a few of the relationships we think about in our lives, but each shows the importance of understanding cause and effect.
Watch the video below, what do you infer about the lyrics? Respond in the following text box.
My dad tells a story about studying all night for his first Biology exam in University. Twelve chapters of reading about cells, chemical exchanges, ecosystems and how life can exist on our planet. Expecting a 50 question multiple choice exam, he almost fainted when he sat down and opened the exam to find one question only:
What came first, the chicken or the egg?
What do think came first? Make sure to use the cause and effect relationship:
Dilemma SOLVED!?!?
Use the anchor chart below to build/reinforce the skills you will be using for the following exercises.
Everybody has a bunch of life stories of learning the hard way. My 3 year old daughter tells the story (see video below) of a disappearing tic tac up her nose. Cause= getting a tic tac stuck in her nose. Effect = panicking parents call 911.
I once put sulphuric acid down the drain after a science lab. Cause = pouring acid down the drain. Effect = school flooded after a pipe burst and closed down for a week.
Another time I put a very sickly feeling boy on my shoulders and flirted with this princess Anna character. I said that the A on my hat stood for her name. It was actually an Atlanta Braves hat.
During the 2 minutes that occurred between the pictures above, my son puked allover my head and the Arendelle Castle carpet. Because of this my daughter got to spend an exclusive 5 minutes with the Frozen sisters while the adults in the room tended to the disaster. Oh and the Disney World Attraction, which had a line about 2 hours deep, was closed for a deep cleaning!
Pick 3 cause and effect relationships from my nightmare Disney story and respond in the text box below:
There are 4 cause and effect relationships below. Use the following text box to identify the cause and effect in each quadrant of the diagram:
There is a list of words that lead the reader from one idea to the next. These are called transition words. There is a list below of the words that are helpful when determining the cause and effect of what is happening and why.
Here they are in action:
1. Since I turned off the light, the room got dark.
2. The room got dark because I turned off the light.
3. I turned off the light, so the room got darker.
4. I turned off the light. As a result, the room got darker.
Now state the cause and effect of the boxes below using a transition from the list above. Use the text box following the diagram to make your responses.
Math time
Last week we dropped meatballs into a sauce pot to see how many it would take to overflow. One of you said that maybe putting the meatballs in first and pouring in the sauce afterward would have saved us all this mathematical hassle. Well your math teacher says that sometimes problem solving out of a script that you didn’t write makes you stronger, wiser and more confident!
How many meatballs did it take? I will give you some numbers, some dimensions, and that will help you calculate this using your math skills. Here are some clues to solving this in real life:
Suppose you have a bunch of golf balls and a beaker that contains a volume of 800 centimetres cubed (cm3).
If I added golf balls to the beaker, just like the ice cubes you put in your drink, the water would rise above the 800 (cm3) mark. What if I asked you how many golf balls would I need to raise the water to 1000(cm3)?
Well some dude like 2000 years ago discovered that the water would rise the exact volume of the golf ball. So if the volume of the golf ball was 40(cm3):
Then the volume mark of the water would rise 40 (cm3) to 840(cm3).
To prove this, I will ask you the following question. If a golf ball’s volume is 40(cm3) and the beaker is at 800(cm3), how many golf balls would it take to raise the water mark to 1000(cm3)?
Did you try something like this?
If you need the water to rise 200 (cm3), and 5 times 40(cm3) is 200(cm3), then it would take 5 golf balls. Do you believe me? Watch this home movie. During the movie use the golf ball and the beaker as stunt doubles for the meatballs and the tomato sauce:
Now back to our meatballs. If the pot has a radius of 15cm and the delicious meatballs have a radius of 3.4cm. The pot is 21 cm high. How many will fit in the pot before the sauce spills out the sides? Use the formulas given below and show your work in the following text box.
Done like diner! meatball diner!
Education and Innovation 