Sports Festival

In this post, we are going to deal with the concept of statistics, analysis of data and its application to our school daily activities. Statistics is the science which studies data collection and analysis and it is present in several fields of our life, such as medicine, economy, sports, weather, and also at school. It is really useful to teach statistics to students because it implies understanding, presentation of data and concluding different issues which can be applied in their daily lives later on.

In this case, we will present a functional activity that can be carried out in our school. The context is the following. All the teachers in our school, especially the Physical Education teachers, are concerned about the free time activities that children do nowadays. Instead of playing traditional games or doing sports, they spent the evenings in their bedrooms playing computer games or surfing on the internet, that is, in front of a screen. This can become a really dangerous problem for their health, so the teachers want to organise a “Sports Festival” at school to encourage learners to practise sport as a leisure activity. However, they do not want to select the kind of sports because they do not know which are the students’ preferences.

For this reason, the students of the sixth year of Primary Education are going to do research following the statistical process. They will be divided into five groups and each one will be in charge of the classes of a level. The first step of the process is the collection of data. Each group will write down on a table which is the favourite sport of their classmates.

The second stage is the interpretation of the data collected and its representation in a graphic. In this way, the learners will see perfectly the differences between the most and the less preferable sports in the school. The graphics allow them to observe the information in a different, colourful and easier way. In this case, they will use a bar diagram and a sector one to see the percentages. To create the graphics, they can use the App “Chart draw” which allow them to create different kinds of graphics. You can download it in the following link: Chart Draw App

Finally, it is time to draw conclusions. Our students will draw their conclusions about the sports preferences at school and they will discuss them in a debate with the rest of the teachers in order to organise better the Sports Festival. This activity can help them to improve their oral expression in public with the support of the results represented in the graphics.

How do you feel today?

How do you feel today? This is a question that all teachers should ask in every class, no matter which subject is. After four years in the Primary Education degree, I can affirm that feelings are as important as any content that we want to teach our students. The teacher needs to know the emotions that his/her students feel to act according to that. If a child feels sad because he/she has any problem, it is better to address this problem first, because it can become a barrier to continue learning. From my view, it is more important that students know what emotions are they feeling and how to regulate them. For this reason, emotions have to be present in the Maths class.

However, can we measure our emotions? Apparently, we can think that emotions are no-measurable reactions, but two years ago, we discovered that we can count them. A teacher in the faculty taught us how to do it. In class, we can work with emotions in many ways. One of the most useful and significant dynamics for children is to associate one emotion with one colour. The book “The colour monster” (“El monstruo de colores”) is so popular because it is a powerful tool which has positive results.

The book establishes six main emotions associated with colours: love (pink), happiness (yellow), calm (green), anger (red), sadness (blue) and fear (black). The following activity that I’m going to suggest was carried out in the faculty with my class and the results were fantastic. First of all, we will ask our students for bringing one button of each one of these previous colours. In class, there will be six containers and each day, at the beginning of the class, all the students will have to put a button in one container, according to the feeling that they have. In this way, we can measure how the class is feeling each day and solve any kind of problem that it happens. The containers and the buttons inside are a visual graphic to represent and measure the emotions. They can also add more buttons depending on how strong the emotion that they feel is. This useful activity can give us a general idea about the mood of the group each day. 

If we can go further with this activity, we will express the results through other kinds of graphics to teach statistics to our students. We can use bar charts or sectors diagrams. For the oldest students, we can also use percentages to represent the data.

Here, there is a home-made video of how to do this activity, though we prefer using another kind of container, like a glass jar.

Our own measuring instrument

We don’t really know the potentiality that our body has for doing things. One of them is the ability to measure using different parts of it. As we have seen in a previous post, in ancient times, people used parts of their bodies as tools of measurement because there weren’t other objects that could measure.

Nowadays, although we can use more accurate systems to measure, as the meter system, I think that measuring with our body could be an enjoyable and exciting activity for our children in order to introduce them in the basic measurement concepts. In this way, they will be active and learning by doing, which is the most significant activity that can be done to acquire any knowledge.

After watching this video, the activity that I suggest is quite simple, but also engaging. Each child will select the parts of the body that he or she wants to use to measure different objects (the foot, the cubit, the hand…). Then, to make the practice more individual, each student will also select ten class elements that he or she wants to measure with the selected parts. Once they have made such decisions, it’s time to free measure! They will collect the information that they get in their notebooks. 

However, it is important to make our children aware that this system is not really precise, because we don’t have all the same size. For instance, the length of a child’s arm is different from the arm of another classmate. For this reason, once they have finished measuring, we will compare the results between children who measure the same object or space. In this way, they will realize that the length of one side of the classroom can be twenty steps or eighteen, depending on the person who has measured it. Therefore, we can say that our body is the most personal instrument to measure! Let’s try it!

Comparing and estimating in class

In this post, we are going to address something which is essential to teach our youngest children, those who are going to learn how to measure soon. Before that, students of the first and second courses of Primary Education should learn to compare and estimate objects and lengths. This will help them in the future to understand and operate with measurement units.

First of all, our students need to acquire comparison concepts: what is longer, shorter, smaller, higher, etc. The best way to do it is through games because they create an enjoyable atmosphere in class and learning occurs without realising. Some simple and feasible games can be carried out in class just taking a wide variety of school materials. Divided into different groups, children will choose the object that the teacher asks for. For instance, the biggest rubber or the longest rule. It can be a kind of competition to make the game more exciting. In this way, our students will learn to distinguish between objects making different comparisons. Once it has been achieved, we can start to order all the objects by its size building several series. The following video can be used to introduce the children to this topic.

Once our learners can compare, it’s time to estimate sizes and measures. It can be done also with the same planning as in the first game. However, in this case, we will ask our groups of learners for different aspects and then, we will check them. If our learners are very young, we will start by asking them if something fits in a place. For example, if a chair fits into a student’s bag. If they have more knowledge about measurement, we can ask them for the length of several objects present in the classroom. For instance, the length of their desks or the window. The children can make the estimations in their minds using the metric system or the system that they want (if they can estimate using a pencil or another specific object). The aim is that their brains start to imagine and think about the issue of measurement. In this way, we are familiarizing their eyes with the concepts of space, distance and length. Finally, we can add this video to our explanation and games to help our learners to compare and estimate.

How to measure at school?

As we already know from our own experiences, the teaching of Mathematics and measurement concepts are often difficult issues to deal with, especially because our learners see them as boring and tedious. This is why, as teachers, we should make the most of our own resources and places to design useful and enjoyable materials that help our students to acquire the main foundations of the subject through practical and fun activities. In this post, I’m going to give you some ideas to take advantage of the current materials and transform them into a measurement resource.

-Table-meter

This resource is quite simple, but also useful. It consists of fixing a ruler in centimetres in each desk of our classroom. In this way, our students can measure all the objects they want without standing up from their chairs. Sometimes, they need to measure an object which is bigger than the current rule that they usually have in their pencil-cases (20-30 cm). Using the table as a meter allows them to measure bigger items. It could be really useful to introduce our learners in the measurement concepts and the metric system.

-Measurement stairs

In this case, we can use the school stairs to help our learners to acquire the metric unit changes. Normally, they get confused with this aspect because they don’t know when they have to multiply or divide. For this reason, they used to be taught with a stair that contains the operations and the unit of measurement involved. However, it doesn’t have the same impact in a paper that in a real stair, which is more meaningful for our children because they can up and down steps to see it. In this way, they use a manipulative resource that they are accustomed to using, but with an educative purpose.

-Angles’ door

Another issue which is usually difficult for children is the measurement of angles. It is really hard for them to know how the protractor works and how to use it. For this reason, we can start by using the class door to draw the different positions of the angles and help them to understand its function in a practical way.

-Fruitmeter and reader circuit

These two resources were used in the class where I did my last internships. The first one is a kind of graphic which is destined to gather information about the times that students bring fruit for breakfast. When it happens, each child coloured a square. This resource is really useful to foster healthy habits between students, but also to know how the graphics works, to compare results, etc. I’m sorry about the picture but I haven’t found the one that I took in my class.

The second resource is a reader circuit, which is used to gather information about the number of words that each child is able to read in a minute. In this case, each student is represented by a car coloured by him/her. This is another kind of enjoyable graphic through which they can see their position and compare it with the other classmates. It is also useful to know how to put a specific number of words between two quantities.