The Case of the Missing Teeth

Lost Teeth Video

Let me begin by saying it was very hard to hear the children in the video.  It would be helpful if there were a close caption option. 

Emerlyn, did you have a hard time as well or is something wrong with my sound?

First video segment –

Why might the teacher ask students to think about differences in the range at each grade level?

 The teacher might want her students to think about the factors that may be causing the ranges to be different.  For example: The age of the child losing the tooth.

What insight do you get into children's thinking as they talked about why the ranges would be different?  I think that the children collectively feel like age is not a factor when it comes to loosing ones teeth. There are other factors such as accidents and as one student mentioned the body may or may not be ready to let go of a tooth.

Second video segment –

Did the children notice what you consider to be important features of the data? 

Yes, one key point that was made is how surprised one student was that a student from the 1^st grade lost 12 teeth.  She went on to say, there was a high probability that some of the teeth were removed by a dentist.   

Are there features that they didn't notice?  It was hard to hear as well as see the data but it seemed to me they had a strong grasp.    What do you think Emerlyn?

Final video segment - Consider the same questions above.  As you are watching the video, notice the ideas students offer about any differences there are between the grades.

While looking at the data from a third grade class the children noticed that the class added a category that listed students who did not remember how many teeth they have lost.  After some discussion, it was thought that the students might have lost teeth so long ago that they may have lost count.

One interesting note is that neither the children nor the teacher mentions what they should do with the data in this category.  Last weeks assignment had similar data and I decided to omit it from my representation. Does this make sense to leave out this information?

Describing Distributions Module from Annenberg

I can honestly say this was slightly confusing for me in general.  It took me what I felt to be a long time to process what each problem was asking.  I guess that is par for the course when taking an online course. Once I reached section “D” I was ready to be done. If I had to chose the problems I had the most problems with it would be the word problems such as:

Problem B2 Using only the histogram and grouped frequency table, give two descriptive statements that provide an answer to this question. (Since the goal is to estimate when a minute has elapsed, it would make sense to again consider how close the estimates are to the correct response which is 60 seconds.) I just can’t wrap my head around what I am looking for. Were you able to answer this question to any degree? Stem-and-Leaf Plots Article Describe anything new that you learned from this article.  How will you use stem-and-leaf plots in your future classroom?  Last semester I spent time with my tutee, who happens to be a first grader, studying place value.  I actually used this method to teacher her but at the time did not know there was a name for it.  I was just separating the numbers so that she could see that there was a tens place and a ones place.  Now I know the name of the system I was using.  I am excited to use the stem-and-leaf plot to help my students better understand the concept of place value. Have you tried a technique that you would like to share? What is the difference between a bar graph and a histogram? There are two differences between a bar graph and a histogram.  One is in the type of data that is presented .  Bar graphs are usually used to display categorical data, while histograms are used to show continuous data. Next is the difference in the way that bar graphs and histograms are drawn. Bars in bar graphs are usually separated where in histograms the bars are adjacent to each other Examine newspapers, magazines, and online media sources that present graphs or statistical information.  Share a few of these in your blog and tell why you think a particular graph was used in each situation. This bar graph was used to show how the number of household internet users in Great Britain increased each year. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/figure2frequencyofinternetusev2_tcm77-322636.png This line graph was used to show the increases of internet usage of three separate users over a period of time.  The user chose the graph to show the upward trend in each category. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ict/graphs/internet.jpg