Some statistics are useful, and some are not. I don't know if this one is useful, but it's kind of fun:
The average book has 64,500 words.
I don't know exactly what I'd do with this in class, but it seems like an interesting opportunity to discuss why we use different statistical measures to describe data, and to get kids thinking about which measures feel useful in which situations. Is mean really the right measure of central tendency for this statistic? Is comparing a measure of central tendency even useful? Why do we care?
There also might be something (less exciting, more practice-y) about using all the stats for each book to work backwards to calculate the standard deviation. That also raises the question of whether mean and standard deviation are really the right descriptors. I am very curious whether word length is a normal distribution. It might depend on what genres of books you include (children's books seem like the have the potential to skew the data).
What other statistical questions might kids generate? How could they use info about the books they're reading in English class to do some further exploration?
Friday, September 4, 2015
Counting Trees
The "Counting Trees" Formative Assessment Lesson from MARS/Shell Centre is one of my favorites. I think it's open ended in an interesting way and I love that kids need to be okay with not knowing the exact right answer.
The other day I heard this story on NPR about how many trees there are in the entire world.
Of course my first thought was the FAL and how I would use this story in conjunction with that lesson. I wonder how I would structure it. Would it be a hook to the lesson or a "beyond"? What parts would I have kids listen to or read? I haven't read the Nature article yet, so I wonder what's in there.
I loved that the story went through a whole process of asking a question, making a conjecture, revising the conjecture, and so on--exactly the kind of thinking process that I want to highlight for kids.
It also raises some interesting questions about rate (how long it would take to plant 1 billion trees), density (if so much forest has been depleted, what did forests used to look like?), and large numbers (what does 3 trillion trees even mean?!)
The other day I heard this story on NPR about how many trees there are in the entire world.
Of course my first thought was the FAL and how I would use this story in conjunction with that lesson. I wonder how I would structure it. Would it be a hook to the lesson or a "beyond"? What parts would I have kids listen to or read? I haven't read the Nature article yet, so I wonder what's in there.
I loved that the story went through a whole process of asking a question, making a conjecture, revising the conjecture, and so on--exactly the kind of thinking process that I want to highlight for kids.
It also raises some interesting questions about rate (how long it would take to plant 1 billion trees), density (if so much forest has been depleted, what did forests used to look like?), and large numbers (what does 3 trillion trees even mean?!)
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