Frog Flippin' (Measures of Central Tendency)

Aren't they cute?!  I found these the other day at my local dollar store.  I plan to put them to good use this year when we come to the topic of measures of central tendency.

Last year, I did an activity I called "Frog Flippin'".  I have about 10 of the medium size version of these frogs.  I asked the students to flip and measure the frog 10 times, record the data, calculate the mean, median, and mode of their frogs distances.  I then asked them to add 30 cm to their longest jump to create an outlier.  I found, at least in my experiments, the frogs were pretty consistent jumpers and didn't naturally create an outlier, so I made one exist. The students then examined what happened to the data with the outlier in it and we discussed what happened when it was taken out.

Next year, I want to add more data for analysis, even if it will take some more time.  I am still giving  this expansion some thought and tweaking but it is pretty well organized.  To expand the project, I am going to add in additional sizes to the activity.  By posing the question: "Which size frog goes the farthest?", I am hoping to intrigue the students enough that they want to know the answer themselves.

The main idea is that students will collect data for 10 flips for each frog in small groups picked by me.  Students will then need to calculate the mean, median, and mode of the data.  I want to open a discussion about how to pick the best measure of central tendency so that each size frog is represented most positively.  Which measure of central tendency should be used?  Will their chose vary by the size of the frog?

After this, I will ask if anyone is wondering anything about their data or the measures of central tendency.  I am hoping someone will wonder if more data would change the results.  I am also hoping that if there is an outlier, someone will question that as well.  Students will then gather data from their peers and recalculate the measures of central tendency.  Students are asked to make observations about what they are noticing.  Then, we'll examine outliers and the role they play in skewing data.

The original activity and the activity that I have been developing are attached if you are interested!


Original Activity:


3 Sizes Activity:

Converting Measures

I am going rogue with my lesson on measurement conversions.  I am leaving the book's explanation and doing my own.  I always try to be fairly consistent with the textbook.  I know that students and parents will reference it.  So, I don't want to create frustration between "the way I taught it" and "the way the book says to do it" when parents are trying to help.

My decision to go rogue started last night when I sat reading the lesson on converting measures and I was having difficulty designing anything.  A foldable didn't seem to fit the lesson, a graphic organizer didn't seem quite right, and just a page of plain notes didn't quite work.  It was just one of those lessons where it felt like the pieces didn't come together exactly.  So I slept on it.

This morning, I realized that what didn't seem to connect for me was the equation that the text was using.  There were a lot of subtle concepts that the students had to understand to make the equation work well.  Students had to understand which units are being canceled and understand how units increase and decrease numerically when you convert in order for the equation to work out right.  I know that their will be questions as to why we wrote the conversion as 3 ft = 1 yd and not 1 yd = 3ft.  Proportions seemed like the natural course to teach these conversions.  So I designed the chart below:

I decided that WKU (Words-Known-Unknown) would be a better way to get students to correctly set up and solve these conversion problems, introduce proportions, and set them up better for how the book will later work with proportions.  I also decided that this was a good time to get them to notice that the units line up, hence the color.  Highlighting the measurement words in the problem will assist then in figuring out the known conversion to use and to set up the order of the proportion.  The only concession that I made using this was that I will just teach them a procedure for solving the proportion verses setting up the algebraic equation.  We'll emphasize that later in the text.  Right now it is about correctly converting between measures.

If you would like this, you can download it here.