The curriculum reinforcer, is a daily practice piece that is incorporated into almost every lesson to help my students to retain skills and conceptual understanding from earlier lessons. My strategy is to use Spiraled Review to help my students retain what they learned during the earlier part of the year. This will help me to keep mathematical concepts fresh in the students mind so that the knowledge of these concepts become a part of students' long term memories.
Today students will learn about Mean (Average). They will complete a learning task during instruction called “Fair Share.” This activity needs the following materials: Counter chips, and a mat with 5 characters at the bottom.
Activity: Each character at the bottom of the mat will receive a certain number of counter chips. Then, I will have my students redistribute the counter chips evenly among the characters to show how each character gets their fair share. This activity is to demonstrate the meaning of finding mean (gathering all the chips together – adding. Then, distributing them among the people – dividing). To ensure that they understand mean thoroughly, I will be sure to provide my students with an example where when the counter chips are distributed, they won’t be able to be distributed evenly and therefore will have a fractional answer. I will use the following amounts for each character.
A video of how I conduct this activity is attached to this section of this lesson.
Using the activity from the opening , I will ensure to demonstrate to students how finding the mean is a measurement of the center of a data set by placing all of the numbers on a number line and showing the students where the mean is in relationship to all of the numbers in the data set.
I will also be sure to demonstrate how to find the mean of a data set using the standard procedure which is to add all the numbers presented in the data set and then divide by the quantity of numbers in the data set. While showing students how to use the standard algorithm, I will ensure that I relate the steps of the standard algorithm to the activity from the opening exercise where students gave the characters, their "fair share."
During the guided practice, I will have the students find the mean of the following data sets using the standard algorithm:
After the students complete these two exercises, we will then discuss any trouble the students ran into while finding the mean of each of these data sets.
Something to anticipate is difficulty with the division portion of the steps to finding the mean. Students seem to always run into issues when it comes to division.
To explore the concept of mean, the students will complete the worksheets attached to this section.
There are a variety of worksheets available in this section to accommodate the several achievement levels that are present in most classrooms.
To close out this lesson, I will select several students to present one of the problems that they completed on any of the three worksheets.
Students are to explain the process that they utilized to arrive to their solution while using precise mathematical language.
The observing students will be ready to ask questions, critique, and comment based upon what is presented.
TOTD: Students will answer the question, what does it mean to find the mean?.