Eating the Evidence
Statistics… Sounds like a really fun, exciting topic doesn’t it? Well, it is in our class. On Monday each fourth grader got their own small box of raisins. Kids wrote their estimates of how many raisins were in each box on a strip of paper that had been folded in half. Then they all hung their estimates on a piece of yarn ordered from least to greatest. Kids figured out what the minimum and maximum estimates were. By subtracting, they learned what the range of their data set was. Finally, they worked on the median, mode and (with the help of calculators) found the mean or average of the data.
Having worked up an appetite, they were pretty ready to eat their raisins, but first they had to count them and compare their new data to their estimates. They were mostly very close and reasonable. After finding the mean, median and mode of the new data set, they finally got to eat the evidence… except for the couple of kids who hate raisins.
