The Three Ways To Find The Average...

Greetings Grade 5's!

I have come across a great game that you can play to sharpen up your data management skills! After marking your unit tests, I can see that some students are still have a bit of trouble remembering how to find the mean, median, and mode of a set of numbers. I think that for many of you the difficulty is remembering which is which...

A little review:

Data Set: 2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 8

The Mean
To find the mean, you need to add up all the data, and then divide this total by the number of values in the data.

Example: Adding the numbers up: 2 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 5 + 7 + 8 = 32

The Median

To find the median, you need to put the values in order, then find the middle value. If there are two values in the middle then you find the mean of these two values.

Example: Put the numbers in order from least to greatest:
 2 , 2 , 3 , (5) , 5 , 7 , 8

The middle value is marked in brackets, and it is 5.

The median is 5

The Mode

The mode is the value which appears the most often in the data. It is possible to have more than one mode if  here is more than one value which appears the most.

Example: The data values: 2 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 5 , 7 , 8

The values which appear most often are 2 and 5.
They both appear more time than any of the other data values.

The modes are 2 and 5

Try playing the game below to help reinforce what is the mean, median, and mode of a set of numbers...

I hope you enjoy playing this game and reviewing at the same time!

Sincerely,

Ms. Greenberg

If you enjoyed this game, Cool Math 4 Kids has even more great math games - check it out!