Bolles Lower School Ponte Vedra Beach Campus fifth graders scrubbed in for an imaginative Order of OpERations math lesson on September 16 in which they played surgeons who solved math problems to save the day for their patients.

Grade 5 teachers Kaki Movsovitz and Elizabeth Walker ’10 developed this immersive, hands-on exercise to creatively engage students and help them apply their developing math skills in a way that was both fun and challenging.

The pair designed four operating rooms, including an Emergency Room, ICU and burn unit, that invited the students to complete order of operations problems to solve the medical issues at hand. For example, one “patient” discovered he needed a tonsillectomy due to his symptoms, and the students completed problems to find the correct tools needed to use in the surgery. 

In the Emergency Room, students had to follow a maze of order operation problems to get out of the ER. In the burn unit, students needed to complete 2-3-digit multiplication problems, and every time they got one right, they used a syringe to suck up water into a measuring beaker. Whoever had the most water at the end won a prize! The ICU also featured problems the students had to think deeply about as their teachers provided them with six different numbers they had to arrange to write the problem for the answer that was given.

To view more pictures from Order of OpERations, visit our online photo gallery. #BollesPVB