AAA Math's interactive tutorials and lessons assist students grades K-8 improve their understanding of a wide range of arithmetic topics. Students are provided with immediate feedback as they complete the "Learn," "Practice," and "Play" portions of each lesson. Browse AAA Math's contents by subject or by grade level.

Video tutorial uses examples to reinforce understanding of how to estimate problems involving decimals. [7:16]

Students will be able to estimate the lengths of objects by mentally partitioning the lengths into inches. A video, worksheets, and a detailed lesson plan are included.

Students will be able to estimate the lengths of objects by mentally partitioning the lengths into inches.

Student teams design their own booms (bridges) and engage in a friendly competition with other teams to test their designs. Each team strives to design a boom that is light, can hold a certain amount of weight, and is affordable to build. Teams are also assessed on how close their design estimations are to the final weight and cost of their boom "construction." This activity teaches students how to simplify the math behind the risk and estimation process that takes place at every engineering firm prior to the bidding phase when an engineering firm calculates how much money it will take to build the project and then "bids" against other competitors.

In this Cyberchase video segment, the CyberSquad must estimate the measurements of Spout the Whale in order to find a cage that will fit him.Ű_í_

Blossom and Snappy use counting to answer their questions about quantity. They eat popcorn and try to find out who has more. They go to an ice cream shop where they count ice cream containers using multiplication, and they use math to figure out if they have enough money to buy popcorn. They also visit Malibu Grand Prix and McDonald's, where they find many ways to use math to figure things out. At the end of the episode, Blossom and Snappy figure out who had more popcorn. Do you know?

Franklin works with Laverne to create a budget for a job painting a room, in this video segment from TV 411.

Students will be able to use estimation to increase fluency when calculating decimal problems.

Harry estimates how long it will take him to get to the front of a long ticket line in this Cyberchase video segment.

Do you know how long it takes your heart to beat 100 times? Test your estimation and number sense skills with this problem-solving challenge. A one-page activity taken from the NCTM Math Challenges for Families Collection. Hints and real-world applications included.

Use this site to figure out if women really do live longer than men. A math challenge taken from today's health journals that explores data collection, data analysis, patterns, and graphing skills. Learn how mastering these skills can be useful in real life situations in this one page activity from the NCTM Math Challenges for Families series.

Take the math challenge. Can you figure out how long you have to wait in line to buy a ticket? An estimation and time measurement challenge from the NCTM Math Challenges for Families collection. Based on real-world themes and application. Hints are included, if you need them.

Students, teachers, and parents alike will enjoy this challenging math site. It contains a clever brain teaser section plus creative problems related to algebra, geometry, measurement, numbers, statistics, and probability. A Spanish version is available.

In this activity students practice measuring techniques by measuring different objects and distances around the classroom. They practice using different scales of measurement in metric units and estimation.

Students determine the coefficient of restitution (or the elasticity) for super balls. Working in pairs, they drop balls from a meter height and determine how high they bounce. They measure, record and repeat the process to gather data to calculate average bounce heights and coefficients of elasticity. Then they extrapolate to determine the height the ball would bounce if dropped from much higher heights.

In this video segment from Cyberchase, Inez estimates whether she has enough jelly beans in her large container to decorate all of the cookies in her batch.

This activity helps students to understand numbers. The teacher should accept without comment any number a student gives and record it on the whiteboard.

Distributions and Variability

Type of Unit: Project

Prior Knowledge

Students should be able to:

Represent and interpret data using a line plot.
Understand other visual representations of data.

Lesson Flow

Students begin the unit by discussing what constitutes a statistical question. In order to answer statistical questions, data must be gathered in a consistent and accurate manner and then analyzed using appropriate tools.

Students learn different tools for analyzing data, including:

Measures of center: mean (average), median, mode
Measures of spread: mean absolute deviation, lower and upper extremes, lower and upper quartile, interquartile range
Visual representations: line plot, box plot, histogram

These tools are compared and contrasted to better understand the benefits and limitations of each. Analyzing different data sets using these tools will develop an understanding for which ones are the most appropriate to interpret the given data.

To demonstrate their understanding of the concepts, students will work on a project for the duration of the unit. The project will involve identifying an appropriate statistical question, collecting data, analyzing data, and presenting the results. It will serve as the final assessment.