During the second week of FE2, we were asked to create an activity for a group of students in our class. My partner (another McGill student teacher) and I decided to create an activity that we could do with many different classes as an introduction to or review of probability.
The activity began with a brief introduction of what probability is and got students thinking about rolling dice. Students were then asked to make predictions about how many times they would roll certain numbers before rolling a die 12 times and recording their results in a Google Form (link provided below). We then discussed how to calculate the probability of a simple event and drew conclusions based on that data from the experiment.
This activity gave us the chance to learn about lesson planning from our CT and allowed us to see how the different the same lesson/activity can be with different classes (e.g. we did the same activity with 4 different classes and none of them were anywhere close to being the same).
Ideally, mathematics education will allow students to create knowledge and develop their skills based on prior knowledge or guiding questions; I strongly believe in this statement and I created the activity based on it. While it may not have worked perfectly with the first, second, or last class, I learned what strategies do and do not work to accomplish this, however, every class is different and the strategies that I learned during this field experience may not work in another school. This became evident to me while doing the activity in several different classes with students of varying abilities.
Attached below are the worksheet, the slides that we used during the activity, and the Google Form students used to record their predictions and data.
Kevin Paquette 