Oreo Jenga and the Central Tendancies

Wow!  That title sounds like a really bad name for a garage band!  :-)  But actually, it was a ton of math learning and fun. An idea I got from a fellow teacher blogger at Runde's Room.

The advanced third grade have been learning about range, mean, median, and mode.  This is outside of their regular grade level curriculum, but has been know to show up on the math ISAT for advanced students.  I wanted them to have a fighting chance at the terms and what they mean (no pun intended) when they see them.

So...we collected data!  How many oreos could they stack without them tipping over?  They could only use one hand and once the oreo left their hand they could not touch that oreo again.  This proved difficult.

So they started stacking.  Each with 2 turns.

It was so hard not to touch them with both hands!

Then they watched them finally...

...tip...



...over!

Each student took two turns and we used their highest stacks to determine the

range: the difference between the highest and lowest value

mean: the average stack

median:  the middle value

mode:  the value (stack size) that happened most often

By far, calculating the mean was the most difficult because we had tons of addends to accurately total.

Here's the data we collected from two of the schools.

Interestingly, between all three schools, there was a central tendency of 18. :-)

The kids were overjoyed to find out that if they see a mean, median or mode question on the Math ISAT, they likely will not see quite so many pieces of data. 

Have a great weekend and weekend!

Angie