Pom Pom Popping Fun

During our maths strand lessons we are currently working on collecting data using tally marks and turning the information gathered into pictographs and bar charts.  On Friday for our Maths lesson we found a fun way to create a scattergraph.

First of all the students got into pairs and were then shown instructions on how to make Pom Pom Poppers using a set of photographs.










The students had to follow the steps and come and get each piece of equipment as they needed it.

Soon all were busy making their poppers.

When they had finished everyone gathered on the mat and each pair were given a pom pom and had 5 minutes to practice firing their pom pom as far as they could.

When practice time was up we made a line behind our masking tape which was to become our X axis line. One at a time each student had the chance to fire their pom pom out of their "popper".  

 

Some only traveled a short distance, while others made it almost to the other side of the classroom.  As each pom pom landed we placed a sticker on the floor where it had come to a stop.  We then taped in our Y axis to meet our X axis and we were able to look at the results as a scattergraph.

Noah's pom pom landed to the left of the small whiteboard.

To extend the students thinking further we used a metre ruler to measure the distances the pom poms had travelled.  The furthest which had been fired by Noah, had traveled 4 metres 72 cm.  The shortest traveled 64 cm.  By looking at the stickers we determined there was a cluster of dots close together and we were able to conclude that the majority of pom poms (9)  had traveled between 1 metre 50 cm and 2 metres in distance.

It was a really fun Friday maths activity which incorporated both statistics and measurement.  Next week we will continue with this activity by using our writing time to create a set of written instructions on how to make the pom pom poppers to go with our photos.