Statistics Abound!

Greetings All,
Everyday I am reminded why I am so glad I took the opportunity to teach 4th grade. It is so refreshing to be teaching skills that are new to not only your children, but to me as well. It is a great deal of fun. This week was a perfect example. Mean, median, mode, and range (check out the fun video in the links section) have been the focus of our math work this week. Statistical analysis has always been a fascinating component of mathematics and the students did a wonderful job catching on. We used real data, as well as some fictional data, to help reinforce how to determine mean, median, mode, and range. A highlight of the week was when we had an Ensworth High School student, Noland Moorer, come to visit. He designed two fun math activities for the students. He first played bingo using mental math and then he passed out mini bags of Skittles (a big hit by the way) and had the students do a statistical analysis (finding mean, median, mode, range) of the Skittle colors. They first did this in their small groups and then they worked as a class to do an analysis for the entire class. Finally, yesterday we did some work creating data sets to analyze by rolling dice. One data set was made up of the girls' rolls and the other was made up of the boys' rolls. We did this several times to look for patterns. The students then worked with a partner to create and analyze their own data sets. It was after observing this activity that I felt comfortable assessing them with a small quiz today. The mean of the class scores on the quiz was 88%.
In Science we spent the majority of the week preparing for our next inquiry project. Last week the students worked on their materials list, procedures, and hypotheses. This week they designed ways to record their observations and data. They also brought in all their materials and prepared their containers for planting. On Monday we will plant the seeds and begin observing and recording. I am very interested to see the results of these experiments. I am really proud of how the students have started to apply their science process skills independently.
As I stated in an email sent today, I have sent home a collection of papers with your child today. Please take the time to go over the each paper with your child. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thanks for all that you do and I hope you all have a wonderful and relaxing weekend.