Statistics... my math nightmare (MAT 257)
Statistics! Tell me truthfully if you like statistics. I'm sorry if you do because... I don't. Well after the lessons in math class I'm not as weary as I was before. In my experience math teachers are really good at making statistics all about a formula and nothing personal or relatable. Why? Statistics should be personal and should be easy to connect to. Thank goodness for my current math teacher who knows how to teach statistics.
Anyway, here is a great introductory lesson to statistics. It's fun, simple, and again like my last post involves a snack! Everybody loves a snack, especially when it's M&M's. For this particular activity, we needed a fun size pack of M&M's and the packet/worksheet.
We started off by making conjectures of which M&M color would occur most or least, as well as if we thought our individual data would match the classes as a whole data. My guess was that Brown would occur most often because of its color closeness to the chocolate inside the candy shell. I also guessed that orange would occur the least... just because. I then concluded with a guess that the data in my individual bag would match the data of the class as a whole because they are all produced similarly.
This is where the fun began! We ripped open our bags and began the worksheet. We counted and compared our conjectures with the data. I was wrong. Orange occurred the most in my bag, while yellow and blue tied for least.
Here is how we counted our individual packs of M&M's.
Oh, I forgot to mention that this activity also taught or covered pictographs, dot plots, and bar graphs. We graphed and gathered the class data, to test our earlier conjecture of whole class data. In the end, our class as a whole had yellow the least and green the most. After graphing the data in multiple ways, we calculated the percents. Our class had 22% Brown, 20% Orange, 18% Blue, 24% Green, 12% Red, and 4% Yellow.
As a conclusion to this activity, my teacher showed us the statistics that Mars Candy has for the amount of each color produced.
Overall this activity was a good ease into statistics, because I know I wasn't looking forward to it. I know there are lots of aspects of this lesson that I could turn around and use in my own classroom. I want to teach Preschool so it would be considerably simpler. I might just have them sit in a group and we can count how many of each color we have and compare with their classmates.
Here was a follow-up activity we did in partnerships to practice circle graphs. We used the data from a drawn bar graph, which we took and turned into a circle which made a template (pictured below on the right) for our circle graph (pictured below on the left).
Anyway, here is a great introductory lesson to statistics. It's fun, simple, and again like my last post involves a snack! Everybody loves a snack, especially when it's M&M's. For this particular activity, we needed a fun size pack of M&M's and the packet/worksheet.
We started off by making conjectures of which M&M color would occur most or least, as well as if we thought our individual data would match the classes as a whole data. My guess was that Brown would occur most often because of its color closeness to the chocolate inside the candy shell. I also guessed that orange would occur the least... just because. I then concluded with a guess that the data in my individual bag would match the data of the class as a whole because they are all produced similarly.
This is where the fun began! We ripped open our bags and began the worksheet. We counted and compared our conjectures with the data. I was wrong. Orange occurred the most in my bag, while yellow and blue tied for least.
Here is how we counted our individual packs of M&M's.
Oh, I forgot to mention that this activity also taught or covered pictographs, dot plots, and bar graphs. We graphed and gathered the class data, to test our earlier conjecture of whole class data. In the end, our class as a whole had yellow the least and green the most. After graphing the data in multiple ways, we calculated the percents. Our class had 22% Brown, 20% Orange, 18% Blue, 24% Green, 12% Red, and 4% Yellow.
As a conclusion to this activity, my teacher showed us the statistics that Mars Candy has for the amount of each color produced.
Overall this activity was a good ease into statistics, because I know I wasn't looking forward to it. I know there are lots of aspects of this lesson that I could turn around and use in my own classroom. I want to teach Preschool so it would be considerably simpler. I might just have them sit in a group and we can count how many of each color we have and compare with their classmates.
Here was a follow-up activity we did in partnerships to practice circle graphs. We used the data from a drawn bar graph, which we took and turned into a circle which made a template (pictured below on the right) for our circle graph (pictured below on the left).
Holli! This is an amazing blog! I can tell you put a lot of time and effort into it. I really love how funny you are when you're being honest about your stance on statistics. You actually covered a lot of information with just this one blog post. I found it very useful because it shows the connections between the crazy amount of information we are being given. Not only did we cover multiple kinds of graphs but we did several hands on activities to do so. I really like that you decided to cover the other graphs in this blog instead of doing separate posts for each.
ReplyDelete