What's the Big Idea? (Data Management)

BIG IDEA:  Graphs are powerful data displays, since visual displays quickly reveal information about the data.

The overall curriculum expectations for this unit are:

• collect and organize discrete or continuous primary data and secondary data and display the data using charts and graphs, including continuous line graphs;
• read, describe, and interpret data, and explain relationships between sets of data

Don't you wish this highlighted part was in English 😕

Discrete data is counted, like the number of students in the class.

Continuous data is measured, like the weight of children' s backpacks.

Primary data is collected by the researcher.

Secondary data is information gathered from analyzing results (like a census).

ONTARIO Math Curriculum

Click here to view the Ontario Math Curriculum

Which One Doesn't Belong?

Look at the graphs below.  Which one doesn't belong?  There are multiple answers!  Ask your child to teach you how to play.

Questions to Ask Your Child

You know the importance of giving your children chances to connect with YOU. You should feel good if your child comes to you for help with math homework. If you’re unsure about math, don’t panic. There are still ways to help. Just keep reading. If you’re good at math, don’t take over. You’ll help most as a guide. No matter what your own experiences are with math, there are questions you can ask that will help your child.

• What is the problem you’re working on?  Let’s look at it.
• What do the directions say?
• What words or directions don’t you understand?
• What do you already know that can help you work through the problem?
• Show me what you’ve done so far.
• Let’s try drawing a picture or making a diagram.


*Courtesy of http://figurethis.nctm.org/index.html

Math Prodigy

All it takes for your child to strengthen their math confidence is 15 minutes of practice every night.  Visit Math Prodigy and tackle Grade 6 Ontario Curriculum aligned questions from all strands of math.

Become a Math Prodigy!  https://www.prodigygame.com/

*Students login with codes received in class and use their own created passwords

Our Really Engaging OREO Math

At the end of a data unit, when we needed some data to practice mean, median, mode and range, I remembered the O.R.E.O. project found here.  Instead of going online with the project this year, our class simply stacked off against one another in what we would call Our Really Engaging Oreo (OREO) math moments!

How Do You Eat Your OREO?

First, we collected information for how we eat OREOs.  This data shows that on this particular day, 8 students choose to bite the cookie whole which is double the number of twist and lick the creme kids and also double the twist and eat the cookie first kids.  Six kids would dunk it in milk first and then eat the cookie.  You can see that we calculated the total cookie eaters, the mean, median, mode and range of the data.

Next, we participated in a little stacking fun!  The rules stipulate that, once a cookie has been placed, it can no longer be touched.  A package of original OREOs contains 27 cookies (in Canada).  We emptied the cookies from the package to make it easier to grab a cookie and stack.

Each student had two chances to stack the largest stack.  All of the students recorded both of their stacks and circled their best score.

The students' record stacks were posted on the board and as a class we talked through the range, mean, median and mode.

Later in the week, I decided to up the OREO game a bit so I broke out the OREO Double Stuf for a "Lick Off"!   Double the creme = longer licking times.  

Students were challenged to lick the creme from the cookie using only their tongue (like licking ice cream).  No teeth scraping...no tongue dragging.  Both parts of the cookie needed to be clean of creme.  And we timed it!

You can see the online timer that we used here.

In their table groups, students worked to calculate the range of their times.  

Try this OREO math with your family!  Guaranteed to be off-the-charts in terms of engagement while packing in some data practice and conversion.  Let me know how it went in the comments!

~MissBrooks

Martha Blah Blah

Data Management

Martha Blah Blah by Susan Meddaugh, Houghton Mifflin, 1996

Summary from School Library Journal (as retrieved from Amazon.ca)

When Granny Flo inherits the company that makes the alphabet soup that enables Martha to speak, the woman immediately fires 13 of the 26 pasta letter makers for the sake of bigger profits. The elimination of these letters from the soup makes Martha's speech hilariously unintelligible. When the quick-thinking dog learns of the cuts from Alf Abbot (unemployed pasta man "A"), she uses her smarts to convince Granny Flo to put the missing letters back in the cans. Each brightly colored page is filled with the zaniness and dialogue balloons of the previous books. Older children will enjoy all the alphabetic wordplay and figuring out the missing letters with the help of the author's footnotes. Great fun!---Maura Bresnahan, Topsfield Town Library, MA

• Write a sentence without using certain letters like the letters A and N.
• Play HANGMAN with a partner.  Take turns guessing letters in each other's words while avoiding having a hangman drawn.
• In the game of Scrabble™, players use letter tiles to form words and earn points. The table below shows the number of tiles available in Scrabble™ for each letter in the alphabet. The total number of non-blank tiles is 98; 2 blank tiles can be used as any letter.  Is the frequency of each letter in Scrabble™ about the same as its frequency in the sample given in the Complete Solution? What are the biggest differences you notice? How would you construct a “better” set of Scrabble™ tiles? How would you assign point values to each letter that represents letter frequencies?