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!