Teaching a learning Mean, Median, Mode, Range, Stem and Leaf, and Box and Whiskers is so incredibly boring. I'm not moving mountains in my class, but doing this did liven this topic up a bit.
My largest Algebra 1 class has 13 students (I know, you're jealous), so I created 13 questions for the students to answer on a google form. Here are the questions:
How many Facebook friends do you have?
What is your locker number?
What is the combined age of your siblings?
What is your favorite number?
How many video games do you own?
How many minutes does it take for you to get to school?
How many text messages do you send in one day?
What time do you usually wake up in the morning? (6:30 --> 6.5)
What time do you usually go to sleep? (10:15 --> 10.25)
How many people do you usually sit with at lunch?
How many miles do you live from school?
What is your current grade in math?
How many months old are you?
I had the students complete the questions on my website at the end of class one day. It was interesting how the students were more concerned with getting the answers to these questions correct than they are about test questions. There were some things we needed to review even to answer the questions. Such as, converting their bed time to a decimal or finding their age in months. You gotta love those teachable moments.
In preparation for the next day I printed out the results and cut them apart so that each student had his very own set of numbers and complete the problems below:
We also had some discussion about outliers. Such as the student who claims that she sends 2000 text message every day. Or the student who believes that he lives 100 miles from school. Keepin' it Real leads to great discussions that the students actually want to have.
My largest Algebra 1 class has 13 students (I know, you're jealous), so I created 13 questions for the students to answer on a google form. Here are the questions:
How many Facebook friends do you have?
What is your locker number?
What is the combined age of your siblings?
What is your favorite number?
How many video games do you own?
How many minutes does it take for you to get to school?
How many text messages do you send in one day?
What time do you usually wake up in the morning? (6:30 --> 6.5)
What time do you usually go to sleep? (10:15 --> 10.25)
How many people do you usually sit with at lunch?
How many miles do you live from school?
What is your current grade in math?
How many months old are you?
I had the students complete the questions on my website at the end of class one day. It was interesting how the students were more concerned with getting the answers to these questions correct than they are about test questions. There were some things we needed to review even to answer the questions. Such as, converting their bed time to a decimal or finding their age in months. You gotta love those teachable moments.
In preparation for the next day I printed out the results and cut them apart so that each student had his very own set of numbers and complete the problems below:
We also had some discussion about outliers. Such as the student who claims that she sends 2000 text message every day. Or the student who believes that he lives 100 miles from school. Keepin' it Real leads to great discussions that the students actually want to have.
I saw this in action in Nora's class and it worked great! Beyond being 'on task," students were really engaged and curious. These categories "hit them where they live," and it made the lesson meaningful, relevant, and FUN for students.
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