September 23, 2013

I think one of the best things about being an education major are the activities.  When you learn how to teach graphing with M&M's, you get a bag of M&M's and you count them and graph them.  When you learn how to teach mode, median and mean, you get to have an activity to go along with it, complete with blocks and sticky notes and interactivity.  It's awesome!
According to my sixth grader, this is the best of all the known math songs videos in all the land of YouYube, and it just so happens to help describe what we want to talk about today.  So, without further adieu....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df-BwzLp3Hc
In class, we played "Grab a Handful" instead.  We each reached into the box and pulled out a handful of blocks, and counted them.  After writing the number on a sticky note, we took our noes and lined up along the wall in order from least to greatest amounts of blocks.  The range went from 7 to 17.  From this, we learned that the mode, or the number with the most frequency, was 12.  We also learned that the median, or number in the middle, was also 12.  Finally, after a difficult, slightly confusing activity in which we were to walk around the room haring our blocks until we all had the same amount, we learned that the mean was 11.4.  We figured this out because at the end, 9 people had 11 blocks and 12 people had 12 blocks, so it was just under half.  Great activity!

September 18, 2013

Besides being the monentous occasion of my son's 22nd birthday, today was the conclusion of the M&M's project, and I learned something really good.  We constructed bar graphs to document the class data from the M&M frequencies.  When the graphs were done, we cut the colored bars out, and taped them together to form a ring.  On a separate sheet of people, we traced the circle, and put a dot on the bar spaces so it formed the outline of a circle graph.  We found the center point of the circle by measuring the diameters, and connected the dots to form divisions in the circle.  After coloring in the sections with the appropriate matching colors, and then adding in the percentages, it became a pie chart to rival any that appear in an Excel program.

I also finished a couple sections of the homework today, and it consisted of a large amount of graphs and charts and how to read them.  It just took a minute so with the extra time, I started looking around for other educational blogs.  We signed up for the Math Blaster newsletter years ago for my youngest boy, and he's always liked it for games, worksheet, and fun.  http://www.mathblaster.com
I also like  http://www.math-lessons.ca/blog/ because it focuses on some of the math concepts that parents might need to brush up on while trying to help their intermediate school age children with their homework, like decimals and fractions. 
Another great site is Dr. Nicki's Guided Math, http://guidedmath.wordpress.com/category/elementary-math/.  It's detailed and comprehensive, and is so full of information.  She's put a lot of work into it.
Now, I think it's incredibly important for kids to have fun with math, and I also think it's important to have these fun activities available to parents as well as kids when they are at home, so I really like this site:http://www.learn-with-math-games.com/math-games-blog.html.  Another, similar site that  is really great at making activities easy to teach and has awesome step-by-step instructions is this one: http://kidsactivitiesblog.com/16500/math-for-kids.  It's really good.

September 16, 2013

Today is Monday, and the start of a new chapter: Data Analysis/Statistics.  This is a subject that's usually greeted with groans and students running for the hills, but we worked with M&M's, so all was well.  It was a fun graphing activity, full of candy and crayons, and well worth coming to class for.

Mrs. Klassen generously provided us with individual fun-size bags of m&M's for our experimental probability graphing/data analysis lesson.  We all enthusiastically predicted what colors would have the most concentration.  I chose brown since it seems like all you get are the ugly brown M&M's.  Smart chics are so underrated.

After all our predictions were made, we happily opened our bags and began to sort our different colors into piles of like-with-like, and placed them on our graph.

By the way, this is not the actual graph, nor is it the actual M&M's.  Picture a similar graph, and about 19 M&M's altogether instead of the 50 or so you see here.  My actual graph, once converted to a pictograph from a real graph, looks a little bit more like this:

 

All told, we learned a lot about M&M's, and a lot about data analysis.  Out of my 19 M&M's, I had 1 yellow, 2 red, 4 green, 5 blue, 5 orange, and surprisingly, only 2 brown.  The class averaged about the same as mine with 55 yellow, 55 red, 67 green, 78 blue, 97 orange and 78 brown.  This data almost matched the percentages of each color as distributed by the M&M company.

September 4, 2013

My name is Tracey Carleton, and this is my math blog.  I'm an education/special education major at Northern Arizona University, and Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona.  I have three kids, ages all spread out-22, 18 and 11- and they've all had different experiences with math.  I personally like math, algebra not so much, but I think it's one of my favorite subjects to teach.
This blog is to document the first weeks of a math class I'm taking, and to share good ideas, and fun math lessons I pick up on my journey towards graduation.