Rhode Island
The Rhode Island Use Math Standards emphasize that “in order to use math, students must…
- Communicate reasoning...
- Generalize, transfer, and apply concepts and strategies to real-life situations...
- Build on prior conceptual knowledge and life experiences.
“Communicate reasoning (e.g., strategies, process, and results) using mathematical language such as oral, written, pictorial, symbolic, algebraic, and other mathematical models.”
Please share a story about how you saw or heard this core concept come alive for students during the Data and Graphs lessons.
During the “clothes” lesson, students who knew how to make fractions and percents from our country graph data were showing those who didn’t know how to do it. Having the graphs helped make it easier for students to “grab” the numbers, and students used calculators, gave oral instructions, wrote out fractions and division on paper, and were literally effectively teaching each other. Moreover, the different countries on the graph gave students many opportunities to try to make percents on their own and check with there[sic] neighbors in a safe comfortable student-centered environment. By the end of the activity, you could see the students who couldn’t make percents before were much more able to find them, at least with a calculator, and the students who had the prior knowledge before the activity were definitely empowered, having explained math concepts in English to their peers, using visual samples, oral language, and “tools” to help them teach.
For every class, my group of beginner readers were able to take the data—talk about it, and then write about it. Some students created pictures—such as drawings and even graphs. This was rewarding for them because they are struggling with oral and written communication.
One of my students clumped her data into geometric squares instead of the traditional bar, circle, or line graph.
For example:
We then arranged these to tell a data story.
Once students had finished creating circle graphs, I asked them to write sentences about their graph and then talk about it in pairs. Some students grasped the concept immediately that the circle represents the whole and they were able to do division to show how each slice is a portion of the whole. They spoke in terms of percentages, i.e., if the whole is 20 and there are 2; 20 divided by 2 = 10, so 2 is 10% of 20. I challenged this by asking what percentage of 20 is 4 and they came up with 20%.
The Countries in My Closet lesson began as a quiet activity (although it was fun to help each other out, by checking each others’ labels on backs of shirts, bands of pants, etc.) that generated a ripple effect that touched interests in “Where in the world do my pants come from?”. Students called out “Where is Maldives?” “Where is Thailand?” We shared (meager) geographical knowledge and then turned to atlases. As each one learned how to find the Latitude & Longitude coordinates, they turned to help another. Having World Maps (flat) and a Globe helped. As countries were located, students colored them in on map outlines. Suddenly a “math” activity was so much more—it was using N°S°E°W° & numbers to open up awareness of our global connection. We pictured who in those countries might have been cutting and stitching our clothes…and WHY.
“Generalize, transfer, and apply concepts and strategies to real-life situations, including across strands and content areas (e.g., reading, writing, speaking).”
Please share a story about how you saw or heard this core concept come alive for students during the Data and Graphs lessons.
During the activity as we were collecting the pieces of data for “favorite foods”, J__ realized that in order to convert the numbers of people who liked meat to the whole, he had to be able to describe it in terms of percent and so had to be able to do the computation. He said he needed to know how to do this for his job and wanted to learn it. He picked up on it right away and said this was something he needed for his job. He was happy.
One student challenged me last week when I said her attendance had been poor lately. When the class graphed (bar graphs) attendance over a 2 week (10 day) period she was able to see that the line above her name (initials) was lower than all the others in the class that day.
Students enjoyed writing their favorite foods on index cards and categorizing them based on what they have in common. Students then classified foods based on the country the food originated from. The countries were then classified into their respective continents. A frequency graph was then generated. Foods were classified into 1 of the 7 continents. Students discussed about sampling techniques. We discussed how the ethnicity of the class can influence the data presented. Random sampling was also discussed.
As we were doing line graphs, I choose to plot all of the scores from the following days spelling tests, because that day all the scores were 80 and above. At the beginning of the lesson 1/2 were interested and as it was progressing all of the students started to become involved. We plotted the coordinates and as I drew a straight line they all realized that the grades were very good and one student suggested that I hang it up for the whole class to see because he thought he was in the smartest class in the school.
“Build on prior conceptual knowledge and life experiences.”
Please share a story about how you saw or heard this core concept come alive for students during the Data and Graphs lessons.
Before starting the lesson on Data and Graphs, the students were given copies of The Providence Journal. I asked them to look through the newspaper and find as many graphs as they could.
The weather page had many graphs and one in particular, the tide graph was difficult to read. One of the students, who is a mechanic, explained to everyone, how to read the graph. He said he was very interested in the weather and looks at the weather page every day. He looks at the tide chart when he goes fishing.
My student had heard that crime rates were decreasing, but her experience (in prison) seemed to contradict that fact. She kept seeing more women cycle in and out; women kept coming to prison.
I had also heard that the mayor had stated that crime was down in Providence, so I went online to gather data about crime in the state & city over the years. By looking at those numbers and analyzing them, we had to then consider the kind of crime (violent, non-violent, and ranges in-between) and begin to consider factors and causes relate to:
- reporting crime
- understanding sentencing mandates (e.g., mandatory minimums, Rockefeller drug laws) in order to make sense of our data.
We’ve only spent two sessions on this, and will, I hope, return to our research and analysis within the month.
After a lesson about labeling graphs and introducing the terms x,y coordinates a student of mine told me it (graphing) was like playing Battleship. That afternoon he taught another student how to play. I heard him use terminology like x-axis and y-coordinate.
The Perez family bought a house. The family wanted to install carpet in every room of the house. Before they moved in, the family has to find the total area for the carpet installation. Every room has different shape: 2 triangle rooms, 1 rectangle room and 2 square shaped rooms. Luckily, they found a tape measure in the car and were able to measure the rooms.
