Mathematics Data InvestigationStudents are settling back into our routines and have been finishing some topics of study started before the break. In Math, we have been exploring the idea of collecting and interpreting data from the James Short Memorial School(JSM) Hampers program that we were all involved with before Christmas. Students were given the information about the families that each of the classes purchased items for and were asked to respond to the following two questions: What do you notice about this data? What questions do you have about the data? Some of the interesting observations and questions that the students developed include:
Questions:
After exploring the data, we asked the students to develop a question that they would like to explore from this data. Their investigations were to involve comparisons of something (that they could graph) and some calculations. Students have been learning to create bar graphs, with a many to one scale, to identify what they graphs show, and to develop questions about what their data shows. We will continue to develop the skills of one-to-many correspondence through our next math investigation as we explore area and perimeter through creating floor plans of our current classroom and comparing it to our new classroom in the rebuilt school. Questions From the Data These examples of student work demonstrate initial inquiry questions that can be answered directly from the data. Some students asked questions that involved creating more complex graphs. Skills they developed included developing a graph with a range of sizes, using double bar graphs to show a comparison between two groups, or comparing several characteristics such as age, size and gender. Other students asked deeper questions that expected them to go beyond the actual data collected to investigate other data. Over the next few weeks, as we transition to our new school, we will be exploring:
What do we need for a good quality of life? Concepts include: - what are our most important needs? using Maslow's hierarchy - how is our quality of life influenced by our environment - what makes our school great? - what will we need to think about as we move to our new school, to continue to have a great school? How does the size of our current classroom compare to the one in our new school? - creating a floor plan - accurate measurement with meters and centimeters - creating a scale (one-to-many relationship) - area - perimeter
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AuthorsMrs. Montanaro, Mr. Messer and Mrs. Austman teach grades 3/4 at Elbow Park School in Calgary AB. Archives
April 2017
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