Monday, April 8, 2013

More to post, but off to a meeting for Track coaches.

Spelling homework:  5 sentences (using 5 words from the Unit 10 spelling list)
1 Complex sentence
2 Compound Sentences
2 Simple Sentences

As a refresher/reminder:

We did an interesting Community Circle exercise today.  I allowed the students to share one thing about their weekend, but then had the following question for them:

I was aiming at them finding specific things or actions they did to get a result.  It could have either been a moment of success or trying to figure out how to deal with a challenging situation.

Here is the prompt I had on the board for when the students were trying to put their thoughts, words, or wishes into action.  A number of students were able to make some concrete suggestions.  Now, it is just a matter of walking the talk in addition to talking the talk.
Details on the Math homework (which was assigned on Thursday!) will be posted.
I actually had to go back to AMG to get my computer.  I forgot it there and apologize for posting this information late.

Okay, what I will do will involve posting some photos from a Math video we were watching in class and then going on to show some calculations and how to solve for Mean, Median, and Mode.

This chart demonstrates how each person ate a certain amount of donuts.

In class, someone used the word "balance" to describe what happen when we average things out.  Here are some calculations and explanation of how we can learn a little more about the Measures of Central Tendency.

The column on the left explains how we find the mean or average.  We add up all the donuts that have been eaten and then divide by the total number of people.  Now we know the answer is 200.  Now, we can use that idea of balance to look at another image of the bar graph:

 So, the average number of donuts eaten across these four friends is 200.  We have balanced out the donut eating among all the people even though Berine didn't eat any in the first place!

Now, there is still the matter of the median and mode.
The median refers to the middle number when they are arranged from lowest to highest.
The mode is the number of measure which shows up the most.

Looking at the calculations again, let's look at the last two measures:

We can see that with 4 number, there are actually two numbers in the middle (100 and 300).  So, we will now have to find the average or mean of both numbers.  Once this is done, we can see the median is 200, the same as the mean.

We have no mode because Bernie, Maria, Buster, and Howard do not eat the same amount of donuts.




There will be one more example I use from the video.  This one has to do with a set of basketball players.

 The question on the show, what was the average height of these players?  It might be easy to say it is 55 because it is half way between 50 and 60, but we have 4 players who are 50 and only one who is 60.  Inches, by the way, the program is American.

So, we not know that the mode is 50, because it is the height that shows up the most.  Let's look at the calculations I did.

We will review the homework questions tomorrow.
Sorry for the late post.