Practical Applications of Math

I just left Mrs. Small's 6th grade classroom and was very pleased with the hands-on learning I observed. One of the greatest challenges in teaching math to middle school students is making the content relevant and meaningful in a practical sense. How many times do math teacher hear students question why they need to learn math? How often do we hear adults profess their ignorance of math above very basic levels? For many, math is an abstract subject with little or no practical application after graduation.

For these reasons as well as others, I was excited and heartened to see the 6th graders engaging in an activity that required them to create rolls of pennies and then calculate mean, mode, median, and range using the tallies for each group. Additionally, groups multiplied and divided using decimals in order to arrive at the average amount of money rolled by groups and individuals.

You may have noticed from an earlier posting here that we are in the midst of the Pennies for Peace initiative, so we have plenty of pennies to be rolled and tallied. Rather than having a select group of students roll pennies Mrs. Small has managed to engage the entire class in useful activities that are also tied to CA content standards.

Check back soon for photos of this activity.