Missed you all... A Mean Median Mode Idea

Hi all, I can't believe I had to miss last week, but I am exhausted and have been sick. When you get a chance - make some posts to let me know what all you talked about and any ideas that were shared.

An activity that turned out really well for me: When we got back from break we were starting a unit on Mean Median Mode and Graphs. The anticipatory set I was supposed to use was giving the class a set of test scores and analyzing that. For me, it was bit boring - and I thought the kids might think so too... So I decided to find out what the kids got for Christmas and do Mean Median Mode along with it. The first day of the activity I gave the kids a large post-it and told them to think of their favorite gift that they either received, gave or saw given - then I told them to write down the approximate whole dollar cost on it. When they were finished I had them place the post it on the white board. We looked at the data and I asked them if they could think of a good way to organize the amounts.... Eventually they agreed to organize them least to greatest or visa versa. From this we analyzed the mean, median and mode through lots of questions, rearranging - etc. It was fun. Then the next day, I gave them a small post it - we actually wrote down the item, and organized them into bar graphs according to category - ex. electronics, toys, clothes, games... They had a lot of fun with this. The kids were very successful is understanding and showing their knowledge of the vocabulary and processes on their unit test....


One other thing we did was Find out the Height of all the kids in each class - in inches and found the mean, median, mode - they loved finding out how tall they were. I taped butcher paper to the wall and two yard sticks up on the wall--- used a marker and marked each class/student separately... It is still up - they want to see if any of their heights change by the end of the year and see the change in "data". They are also working on putting graphs together boys versus girls from the data.... it is really cool how interested they are in it.

I have taken pictures of the Christmas stuff - I will see if I can put them on here.