The Bulletin Board That Makes You Think

Hi All,

As students learn about each other in the beginning of the year, a good opportunity to collect data and learn some problem solving skills present itself.

It's very common, and interesting, for teachers to collect data about students and display it on a bulletin board. For example, you might have a display that shows a bar graph of students' birthdays. Or maybe a survey was done about favorite colors or favorite ice cream flavors and you create a pictograph of this information.

Once a bulletin board is up, we don't want to take it down right away, right? But it's not usually going to change much either. So, here's a way to keep this math bulletin board interactive.

Let's say you do this survey on a Thursday and create the bulletin board display featuring this data on a Friday, the fun can begin on Monday.

When students return to school on Monday, they will find a question on the bulletin board about the data. Each morning when they show up they will find a different question on the bulletin board. This is a good morning work activity for students as they arrive and settle in.

Here's an example using data from a survey of favorite ice cream flavors. Each vote by a student is represented by a scoop of ice cream of that particular flavor.

Here are some possible questions for the first week:

Monday - How many students like vanilla ice cream best?

Tuesday - How many students took the survey?

Wednesday - Which two flavors had a total of 9 votes?

Thursday - How many more students like chocolate than strawberry?

Friday - Which flavor got half as many votes as chocolate?

You can create questions that focus on addition, subtraction, comparison, fractions, and a lot of other math content. This helps students to think about data in a lot of different ways from a lot of different angles.

For the second week, invite students to create their own questions and post those on the bulletin board.

Students will arrive each morning wondering what that day's question will be and if it might be theirs. And that's not a bad way to show up at school to start the day. :)

All the best,

Bob

Comments

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