Math Madness

Hello everyone! Today I want to share a great way to study for math I just discovered. This tool saved my life for my midterm. It’s very interactive and allows the creative mind to express itself. It also is such a great way to connect all the material you've learned. So here's the secret...a mind map! You might be wondering what this is? It is essentially a brainstorming web that students most often use for writing but, I found it so helpful for math thanks to my instructor. We created our mind maps to organize the different types of data and graphs that we learned throughout the semester. The mind map was so helpful to relate what type of graph to use for what type of data. It gave me a chance to make the connections, while writing it all down and helped me remember everything I needed to know. I think it is so important to incorporate various types of learning styles in your classroom for each individual. A mind map allows creative students to branch out and see how they t...

Hey guys! Today I want to talk about graphing data, I know it’s so fun, just wait till you read about it! This in-class activity was not only a great learning experience, but it was also tasty. Our instructor gave each person their own mini bag of m&m’s and we predicted what colors we thought were going to occur the least and most often. Then we all opened our bags and recorded our data using a pictograph. Next, we recorded our class data using a dot plot. Lastly, we constructed another pictograph and bar graph to finish showing our class data. This activity was really intriguing because we got to explore different types of graphs while eating m&m’s and who could complain about that? I learned that pictographs are fairly easy to make, can handle large sets of data, and are visually appealing. Pictographs can be hard to read, like when we used a pictograph to represent the class data. On our pictograph each circle represented ten m&m’s and you had to fill the circle a tiny...

Hello once again! I am so thrilled to share another activity today, because it so fun and engaging for everyone. Before this activity I could calculate the mean, median, mode, and range if I had a refresher on how to calculate each one. Although, after this activity I learned how to calculate any measure of central tendency and range, know when to use it, and how to interpret what it means. With just some cubes and a group of people you can recreate this same activity and trust me you will love it! To do this activity have each person grab one handful of an object (we used cubes). Then each person records how many they grabbed, and how many people are participating. Then our class all lined up from least to greatest, and if more than one person had the same number, they stood in front of one another. We then were able to calculate the range by taking the person who grabbed the most at the end of the line and the person at the beginning who grabbed the least. Next, we could visually s...

Hello again, I am sharing about tree diagrams today which honestly used to freak me out. Before this lesson I felt like there was never going to be a point in my life were tree diagrams actually made sense. Although, with the help of this lesson and a few black and white pom pom's, I am officially a pro now! ;) So today I am going to share the activity that made tree diagrams life changing for me! Here’s the lesson below: This lesson was extremely helpful for me because I was able to run the experiment and use it to create my tree diagram. Before this lesson I didn't understand the concept of tree diagrams and why we use them. The tree diagram helps us to determine all possible outcomes and then we can find the probability of certain events occurring. I would use this lesson in my classroom one day as I think having students running the experiment and creating a tree diagram really helps them gain a deeper knowledge rather than just doing the math. If you want to further y...

Hello! I am so excited to share the activity that made probability fun to learn! Believe it or not, this activity makes probability easier to visualize. The objective of this activity is for one to see how probability is determined, the difference between experimental and theoretical probability, and mutually exclusive and non-mutually exclusive events. The activity has you take a bag of different colored goldfish and separate the green fish which represents sick fish from the colored fish which are healthy fish. Then, you total up the number of "healthy" fish you have and the number of "sick" fish you have. After counting your fish, then you get to the fun probability part! The activity asks you to find: The probability that a fish in your sample is healthy. The probability that a fish in your sample is sick. The probability of not getting a healthy fish. The probability of not getting a sick fish.  The reason I found this activity so helpful and I was so ea...