Other than Bar and Bat Mitzvah invitations, what could household mail have to do with 6th grade math?
For our recent graphing unit, students were asked to categorize and tally their family’s mail. At the end of two weeks, they not only wrote a paragraph describing their findings, but also used online technology to construct a graph they felt could best display their results. While some students used circle graphs for the display, others used line and bar graphs. Our classroom culminating activity Friday was the best part. Students were divided into teams of two and asked to respond to the following challenge:
“The United States Postal Service is having a budget crisis. It has been proposed (suggested) that in order to make the mail system more cost effective, they decrease mail delivery from 6 times per week to 5 times per week. Using your graph and the graph of your partner, determine the day they should stop mail delivery in your neighborhood in order to save money. You will have 90 seconds to present and prove (based on the information contained in your graphs) your suggestion to the class.”
Students had 5 minutes to prepare their mini-presentations. Using a document camera to display their tally information and graphs, the student pairs made suggestions using their data. Using “presentation language”, students responded to a “real-life” problem using data, technology and grown-up presentation skills!
