Chance — Victorian Year 3 Maths
Chance words from impossible to certain, listing the possible outcomes of coins, dice and spinners, and running and recording chance experiments. Three subtopics and 60 practice questions, aligned to VC2M3P01 and VC2M3P02.
Chance in Victorian Year 3
Chance is about how likely something is to happen. In this topic students describe events with words such as impossible, unlikely, even chance, likely and certain, list the possible outcomes of coins, dice, spinners and bags of counters, and carry out chance experiments, recording the results and talking about why they vary.
The three subtopics below are Describe the chance of events, List possible outcomes and Chance experiments: record results and variation. Chance is one of the 18 topics in Victorian Year 3 Maths and belongs to the Probability strand. The work comes under Victorian Curriculum codes VC2M3P01 and VC2M3P02. These skills lead on to ordering events from least to most likely in Year 4.
Subtopics
Chance: common questions
What chance words do Year 3 students use?
Five words, in order: impossible, unlikely, even chance, likely and certain. A good test is to ask whether it will happen, might happen or won't happen. Rolling a 9 on a normal die is impossible, and a spinner that is mostly blue is likely to land on blue.
How do you list the possible outcomes?
Name every different result that could happen, then count them. A spinner with five different coloured parts has 5 outcomes, whatever the size of the parts. The outcomes are only equally likely if the parts are the same size.
Why do chance experiments give different results each time?
Each toss or spin is up to chance, so the results jump around. If a coin is tossed 40 times we expect about 20 heads, but 18 or 23 is perfectly normal. Different groups doing the same experiment will usually get different counts.
How can we practise chance at home?
Play board games and talk about which numbers are likely or impossible. Make a spinner from card and a pencil, predict what will happen in 20 spins, keep a tally and compare the results with the prediction. A common mistake is thinking a result is "due" because it has not come up for a while.
Which curriculum codes cover Chance in Victorian Year 3?
Describing chance and listing outcomes come under Victorian Curriculum code VC2M3P01, and chance experiments come under VC2M3P02.