So on this Monday morning, imagine my joy, when I stumbled upon DASL (pronounced dazzle). DASL stands for Data And Story Library. This site contains many different data sets AND the accompanying story of how the data was collected.
Within 30 minutes I had located a great data set on student opinion on popularity and put together a quick introduction to finding 'averages' for my sixth grade math class. I love that I was able to find data from real sixth graders for my students to puzzle over (see file below).
I will present them with the data set and ask them a few questions to puzzle over the data before introducing the idea of mean, median, and mode to help us identify patterns in the data.
Thank you DASL!