What’s up in math?

We review a lot of important skills in math. Skills like listening carefully to others’ reasoning and repeating it back, using a pencil well, organizing a journal well, and staying organized are all really important math skills that we review every day in math. We also review more standards-based skills like multiplication facts, place value, and drawing pictures to represent a story problem.

In addition to this review, we’ve started a data unit in fourth grade math. Perhaps your fourth grader came home and began counting writing utensils, or announced that they got to eat fruit snacks in math class. That was because of the data unit! Students are learning to create line plots of data sets. Soon we will begin plotting two different data sets on the same plot in order to compare them to each other.

Students have some familiarity with line plots and terms like “outlier” because of their data unit last year. In fourth grade, we are working hard to not only identify things like range and outlier, but to also explain clearly what those details about our data show. For example, students are learning to verbally articulate that if the range of our heights is 52 – 61 inches, no one is taller than 61 inches and no one is shorter than 52.

We have some great connections between this unit and other school activities. In STEAM we are talking about variables, and collecting data on heights was another moment to think “What variables will affect our data? Maybe how we stand? What shoes we wear?”

We are also collecting baby food for the service project this month, and the 4/5 is having some healthy competition. We are keeping track of how many each grade has collected and will graph it soon, as well.

Next week, the students will start their own data collection projects. They will write their own questions, collect data, graph & analyze, and present conclusions.