Fruit Bowl Problem Calculating Probability Tree Diagram Without Replacement Circus Activity

Fun exercise for many age ranges. Will provide a good amount of discussion and is a nice next step after calculating probabilities to then progressing on to dependent events.

Originally I used this as one short activity in a "Circus" of many activities which students go around the room playing on. (More of my Circus Activities are uploaded on my resources elsewhere)

Print out the resources enough for each group (I split the class into pairs) but put the Tree Diagram on A3 for tables of 4 to complete.

Each group needs a picture of a bowl on A4 and a selection of fruit (I printed out 9 pieces of fruit per A4 using "Windows Photo Printing"). Ideally laminate these for durability. Try to get the fruit on equal size cards so that they can be turned face down and chosen at random.

First give them all the task sheet - you could always laminate these so that they use dry wipe markers so that they could play it twice. The task is pick a piece of fruit at random and then record it in the table and then calculate the probability of getting what's left.

This is usually enough of an activity to do in a "Circus" however its a good intro for tree diagrams hence the work on tree diagrams as well.

Note that the SMART Notebook has the fruit images already added in the attachments as a gallery file. The SMART Notebook file has a variety of different size tree diagrams - you could choose which students to give the smaller (easier to complete) to.

I've included a few tree diagram templates for your use.