Weekly Report & Reflection #10:

Heartwell, 2015

This week, our class discussed Data Management and Probability. Data management can be described as collecting and describing data, in ways that it can be displayed and analyzed in order to make sense out of the data.

The first presenter this week was myself, presenting the real-life applications of data management. My opening exercise, was having the students think-pair-share with their group members about where data management is used within the "real-world". I received answers from my peers ranging from average rainfall to average yearly income. I had the definitions displayed up on the board, with
mean, median, mode already defined on the white board. This way, I could adequately explain what an average was, verbally explaining it for the auditory learners, and visually representing it on the white board. My group explanation was to make the tables a shoe factory, and have them find out what the most important average was for this problem. Most of the groups came up with mode, or the most frequently occurring shoe size, as optimizing the production of shoes. This activity was designed for students connecting to the problem and reasoning to real-world problems.

       The next presenter was Asma, who explained data management while using bar graphs. She had the class represent their favourite numbers up on the board. She represented this by having two people draw their results on the white boards. She facilitated this first by asking the class to get into pairs, and record the amount of times they rolled certain numbers with 10 rolls. After she had us find out what the most frequent number we rolled was. She mentioned the importance of labelling the x and y axis, as a prerequisite for comparing two unlike things.

Heartwell, 2015

     Before this week, Jake presented on geometrical sense on the measurement of prisms. He introduced to the class the idea that volume is a cubed value, with three dimensions. I was really happy that he thoroughly explained this concept to us because a lot of the class did not understand this concept. He had us complete the unfinished prisms, labelling the volume on the board as quickly as we could. This was a very effective way of teaching this concept.

Heartwell, 2015

       Making Math Meaningful, also identified the many ways to represent concrete graphs using models. Pg. 520, reveals an activity to arrange themselves to compare a certain number. This visual representation of lining the students up in  a row makes it easier for the students to tell which group is bigger. This activity reveals teachers having the opportunity to talk about why it helps students to visually represent objects, ensuring a quick visual comparison for the visual learners.

Thanks for listening.