Post date: Jan 17, 2020 8:17:28 PM
MSM2 Periods 1 & 4
SOLs Covered: 8.12-13 Data Anlaysis (8.13 Scatterplots & 8.12 Box Plots)
Math Unit: 14 Data Analysis
Daily Agenda: Jan. 13-17, 2020
Upcoming Assessments: 2.04 Data Analysis Quiz (Thurs. 1/23)
Math 7H Period 3
SOLs Covered: 8.12-13 Data Anlaysis (8.13 Scatterplots & 8.12 Box Plots)
Math Unit: 16 Data Analysis
Daily Agenda: Jan. 13-17, 2020
Upcoming Assessments: 2.04 Data Analysis Quiz (Thurs. 1/23)
Greetings! I wanted to start this week's update by sending a huge thanks to everyone who sent in supplies this week in answer to my plea last week... THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!! It's been a huge help and the kids and I have very much appreciated it! We're in a good spot with pencils right now (not desperate, though I would never turn down more!) and I've had several kids tell me they have snacks they're going to bring in to add to the snack bar next week (again something I'd never turn down more of if you want to send something), but we're now in need of glue sticks and starting to run low on tissues. If you're able to help with any of these supplies, it is very much appreciated but again never required. If you happen to see any deals on any of the these things, please drop me a line so I can run to the store (or site) and snatch them all up. Now onto this week's math happenings.
We started the week wrapping up the quiz as I mentioned in last week's update. The results were all over the place but no matter the score, please encourage the kids to take advantage of the opportunity to possibly improve upon their scores by completing an error analysis. As I've told the kids in class, I'm usually available to help with this during lunch, though there will be less time for that starting next week when my round of lunch duty starts. I'm not completely unavailable at that time and will hopefully have days I could pop outside of the cafeteria to the "quiet tables" in the hall for any questions, but for the most part I'll be helping out inside. Of course, students can still ask questions in class during periods of independent work time (typically at the beginning or end of the block).
The rest of the week has been spent exploring a new branch of math as we transition from algebra to statistics. As the kids discovered, there is some carryover as the concept of slope ties into correlation, which is a concept covered with scatterplots. A scatterplot (or scatter plot, scatter graph, scatter chart, scatter diagrams, scatter gram, or scattergram) is a type of graph that shows the relationship (or lack thereof) between two sets of data. The kids seem to have caught on to this concept very quickly, though some are slightly confused with the type of relationship (positive, negative, no, or constant) when taken in a literal sense. In other words, some kids see a "negative correlation" to mean it's a "bad thing" when it really just means that as the x-value increases, the y-value decrease. Using our understanding of slope from our functions unit helps clear up the idea once we add the line of best fit (positive ↗, negative ↘, constant →, while no correlation is literally "scattered" all over the place).
The end of the week saw us starting to work with box plots (or boxplots or box-and-whiskers plots), which divide a data set into quarters and is created by finding five different data points: lower extreme (lowest value), lower quartile (median of lower half), median (of the whole set), upper quartile (median of the upper half), and upper extreme (highest value). The kids are still struggling a little with the creation of these, but they are finding it easy to read the data from ones already created, which is most of what the standard assesses. We might have to scrap one of the assignments for this topic since it appears the site I use for it is no longer available, but I'll play around with it this weekend and let the kids know on Tuesday (since we're off Monday) whether or not they can skip it. We'll continue working on this unit next week and should be ready for the quiz by Thursday.
I've paced out the rest of the year (which can be seen on the class calendars here if you want to peak ahead at what's to come), so I'm going to close things out by warning everyone that we will likely end up with loads of snow days this year because of it... sorry! Obviously there shouldn't be any actual correlation between the two things, but anytime I try to plan ahead, Mother Nature likes to come along and make those plans obsolete, requiring me to re-plan everything, usually multiple times. Maybe this year I'll start tracking the data so I can have the kids create a scatterplot to prove or disprove my theory (I'm sure they'll love that if it means they got a ton of snow days).
That should cover everything but as always, feel free to email if you have any questions. I hope everyone has a great weekend! Stay warm as winter starts to make it's return to RVA!