Life in Pieces. Thursday night TV but also how some of my students see math. Some of them see the individual concepts but have a really hard time making the connections that tie it all together, they compartmentalize information and have trouble breaking out of the boxes they build. Some of them need to see the connections to make sense of the details. Either way, they are seeing “math in pieces” and not making enough sense.
I’ve been making a real effort to build bridges between those pieces, to help them see the connections. As part of that effort, I wanted my students to see the similarities and differences between different data representations. To that end, I created a foldable in which they had to compare and contrast line plots, frequency tables and histograms.
Comparing & Contrasting Line Plots Freq Tables Histograms
Usually, when we work with foldables, the kids focus on working down a column. They see it as a category. With this foldable, I encouraged students to also look across the columns, to think about the similarities and differences between the representations
I’m still working on figuring out how to help my students build the bridges, but this did seem to be an asset for my students. They were able to successfully build all three representations on yesterday’s quiz.
Math.Easy.As.Pi 