#aprilblogaday 6th Grade Measures of Center and Variablilty

Before break we touched a little on these topics with the intent to dive in a little deeper once we come back.  I feel like students got the basics down and could calculate mean, median, mode, range, and make a box plot etc.  But I don't think they really get the why part. There are two lessons I know that I am going to try with them next week that I'm really looking forward to.

The first is from the Mathematics Assessment Project http://map.mathshell.org/materials/lessons.php?taskid=486&subpage=concept
I have done these types of lessons before and the students really enjoy them.  I really like the activity where they match their cards and then send out a group member to check other groups work.  I have to decide if I will try to fit this in one class period (50 min) or two.

The second is from Mathalicious which is one of the best web resources I ever found.  The tasks are so good and interesting and it is just set up so well.  Here is the task I'm going to use: Wealth of Nations  This is based off a video I've seen before and it is mind blowing.  I really hope that my students see what a big deal this is and also make the connections between the spread of data and what that means in real life.