Week 11

Chance & Data

According to Geist (2001) every day children in the classroom actively work with raw data. They generate, organize and interpret data and they draw conclusions or make predictions on the basis of the data they have collected. Hence it is important to expose and teach the young learners about organizing and interpreting data.

In the workshop, we did sorting smarties according to their colour and comparing the amount of smarties between peers. We also get to predict the number of times the spinner (clips) land on the colour.

Making the smarties into a bar chart

Data collected when predicting the number of times the clips fall on a colour

The idea of using smarties to teach the young learners about data makes me realise that that I need to be more creative in my teaching and maximize the use of materials and resources in the classroom so that I will be able to get the students interested in what they are learning. This workshop has also proved to me that learning Mathematics can be really fun if we could incorporate good resources, materials and fun into the lesson.

Reference:

Geist, E. (2001). Children are born Mathematicians. Young Children, 56, 12-19.