The Flip Flop Fiasco

The Flip Flop Fiasco is an exciting math activity that your students will enjoy.

Here is the breakdown of the scenario students will be prompted with:

All the kids in our class wore flip flops last Friday. There were so many stubbed toes that our teacher called the day a ‘fiasco’!

At the end of the day, our teacher sat down to find out just how many bandages she’d used from her box, which had 1,000 bandages in it at the beginning of the day.

Using the following information, the attached work-mat, and your mathematical genius, can you figure out how many bandages our teacher used and how many are left in her box?

o Our class usually has 26 students but 3 were absent.

o During first recess, the following fiascos occurred…

     1. 12 students stubbed two of their toes.

     2. 8 students stubbed three.

     3. The rest of the students didn’t stub any toes.

 o During second recess, things got really bad…

     1. 9 students stubbed 3 of their toes.

     2. 7 students stubbed four.

     3. 5 students stubbed all the toes on their left feet.

     4. The rest of the students didn’t stub any toes.

o And last recess was the worst…

     1. 6 students stubbed all the toes on their right feet.

     2. 8 students stubbed 7 of their toes.

     3. The rest of the students stubbed all the toes on both feet!

Extensions (If you want to impress your teacher)

o What if our teacher’s box had started with 500 bandages? How many would she have left after our flip flip ‘fiasco’?

o What if twice as many toes had been stubbed? How many bandages would our teacher have used? How many would she have had left in a box of 1,000?

***Answer key included

A 5 page printable PDF