The activities in this lab are fairly straightforward, but kids will be kids so make sure that you use washable markers and flat surfaces. If you let the kids keep on their shoes for the activity, which most of the kids we worked with chose to, it will increase their height by an inch or more, this will skew all of your group data to the higher percentiles, but is fine as long as the kids know that their shoes are giving them height that their doctor would not measure for their annual checkup. Another thing that is very helpful, if you want the kids to be able to read the chart on their own, is to make large printouts of the chart (I did this by hand for the numbered charts and for the graphs, be warned by hand takes a few hours but is very much worth it for the kids to be able to stand in a group and work together to read the chart).
For the second part of the lab, we have in the lab to use a box of mixed beads. As activities go this one is fun but the kids counting lots of beads tend to get bored very quickly, so expect only 5-10 counts to be completed in this manner. In order to get more counts we used melty beads in two colors and put certain amounts of one color to mimic different distributions. We melted the beads together into squares and had the kids pull the squares out of a black bag at random and mark the number of whichever color they chose to count. Using this method the kids were able to get up to 50 counts from a single bag or distribution set. Making the distribution sets took us a few hours to setup all the melty beads and to melt them together.
No comments:
Post a Comment