Great day in the classroom!

Today I got the chance to work in a grade 7 classroom where we were working on an introductory lesson for probability. As we planned the lesson, the classroom teacher and I anticipated some of the misconceptions students generally have when dealing with proability, e.g. being probable does not imply being certain.

As I often do, I used Marian Small's book, Making Math Meaningful to Canadian Students, K-8, as a source of inspiration. We chose to try out an activity in the book for the"mind's on" portion of our lesson. We began the conversation with trying to place 3 scenarios along the continuum and label them accordingly. The scenarios we had decided upon were hoping to bring out the terms: "impossible", "certain" and "equally likely" as well as the percentages, decimals & fractions related to each of those concepts. Trying to come up with a name for the middle of the continuum got to some great conversation around the misconceptions. We then distributed sets of cards to each group where students selected an everyday example of probability (e.g. from a newspaper)and then had them try and estimate where along the continuum they felt their example fit. In addition to being a useful tool to help students describe and compare the likelihood of real events, we were able to work on the students' flexibility around decimals/fractions/percentages. Students were negotiating with each other where they should place their card and for students who were struggling, we got a chance to probe them with further questions to help them deduce where their card belonged. What a rich way to start a unit that assumes great flexibility in number sense around fractions/decimals/percentages. Thanks Marian!