For my weekly work I decided to work with the mean, median, and mode and researched different ways to teach the concept through fun classroom activities. I also found real life applications of them to help teach the lesson in a way that students understand why they are learning it. To start I would discuss what it is, such as the mean being the result of adding all the numbers and dividing by how many there is. The Median being the middle number when the numbers are placed in order and the mode being the number that appears most often.
In my lesson for teaching mean, median, and mode, I would discuss the real life applications and talk about how their own grades are sometimes calculated using this math. To get the students to relate I would talk about how baseball players use the mean to calculate their batting average or even the mode to show a pitcher's most common amount of hits or no hitters by figuring out which number appears the most. I also researched how students can take the information about mean, median, and mode and use it in their future careers. For example, by understanding the concept of mean, people can be aware of applying for a job when it says the salary average and knowing that it may mean way lower or higher.
I found a couple creative ideas for teaching the mean, median, and mode in a way that students would understand better through a hands on math project. The first is a lesson called Candy Colors, where I would give each student a little bag of colorful candy such as M&Ms or skittles and have the students sort them by color. They would find the mean, median and mode of the candy. The students would then compare their answers with others to talk about what they did. Another fun idea that I found was to make students pair up with a partner and role a dice 25 times. They would record their results and find the mean, median, and mode. This lesson could also be combined with another math lesson of probability because it deals with the chances of certain numbers appearing.
I think that as a teacher, it is a responsibility to make learning fun but in a productive way. By using the two ideas of Candy colors, and the dice rolling, students can learn hands on rather than doing tons of worksheets, although they still would do some. It is important to get the students interested in the math by helping them understanding the purpose and be able to relate like the baseball example so they will want to learn more.
RSS Feed