Before Kayley Gates taught fifth- and sixth-grade math classes at Salisbury Elementary School, she taught first grade in another district. When her first-grade students in the other district were invited to take part in a carnival that involved a math unit being completed by older elementary school students, Gates tucked the idea away for future use.
This spring, when it was time for Gates' 45 math students to complete a unit on statistics, she decided the carnival idea would be a great way to wrap up the lessons. "We called it our Statistics Carnival," said Gates, who divided her students into groups and assigned 13 games for them to run at the carnival, which was held May 9. Half the students ran the games in the morning, and half ran them in the afternoon.
"We invited the kindergartners as an end-of-year celebration for them to come and play the games," said Gates. About 50 kindergartners divided into three classes attended the carnival one class at a time.
For each of the assigned games, the math students were required to create the rules and devise ways to record the data. Among the activities were a bean bag toss and a pick-a-duck game. "(For the bean bag game), the kindergartners threw (the bags) into the hole to score points, and the fifth- and sixth-graders recorded the number of points they scored and then figured out what the mean was for the game," explained Gates. Other students figured out that the range for a game ran from five to 30 points. For the duck game, kindergartners chose a duck, and the older students recorded the frequency with which each of the numbers came up.
Gates noted that the win-a-fish game was a big hit. "You throw a ball into a bowl and win a fish, but we just used plastic fish," she said. Her students recorded how many kindergarteners were able to earn a fish or if they were able to get more than one ball in a bowl.
Kindergartners received prizes for playing games. Gates said the prizes were provided by a mini-grant from the Salisbury Parent Teacher Organization.
After the carnival was over, each group of math students that had worked together turned in a project. "(My math students) had to summarize the results; discuss anything they had to change during the game, such as moving the throwing line; and create a box-and-whiskers plot - a graph that shows the median of the data and the range of the data," said Gates, who added that she was pleased with the students' responses to the unit. "It was a real-world application of statistics," said Gates, who noted sometimes it is hard for students to see how a concept relates their lives. "Some of them even said, 'Now when I go to a carnival, I know which games I might be more likely to win or which ones might not be worth spending the money,'" reported Gates.
Gates enjoyed seeing the kindergartners and older students interact at the carnival. "All of the students were so engaged," she said, adding that kindergartners told her they were looking forward to running the carnival when they were older because they were so excited about it. The fifth-grade students also buzzed to each other about which games they looked forward to running next year.
According to Gates, the unit taught the students something about responsibility for a job well done, as well. "They took a lot of ownership and were very proud of what they were able to accomplish," she said.
Leave a Review