Everyday Math Monday: On the Average…
Averages come up in everyday life all the time, and knowing what averages mean and how to find averages helps your child think about them differently whenever they come up. There are lots of real-world situations that you can use to help your child practice calculating averages, from baseball scores to hours of sleep.
People talk about averages a lot in a casual way, but the term has a precise meaning in math, where it’s also called the “mean” or “arithmetic mean.” To calculate the average of a set of quantities, you add them up and then divide that total by the number of quantities or items in the set.
Materials
- Notebook and pencil
- Pocket calculator
- Sports section of a newspaper
Getting Ready
Think of some areas of interest for your child (baseball? basketball? a favorite team?) and then make a list of some ideas for what kinds of averages might be calculated related to them.
Activity: On the Average…
- Review with your child how to find an average by adding up all the items in the set of quantities to be averaged and then dividing that total by the number of items. A good way to do this review is to figure out together the average amount of sleep you or your child got over the past five days. For example, if you slept 6 hours on Wednesday night, 7 hours on Thursday, 6 on Friday, and 8 on both Saturday and Sunday, what was the average amount of sleep you got on those five days? (The total hours, or 35, divided by the number of days = 7 hours.)
- If your kid likes sports, that’s a great starting place for figuring averages. Use statistics from the sports pages, or draw on his own knowledge and memory, even from the teams he’s played on. “Who’s your basketball team’s best player? How would you find out that player’s average scoring so far this year?” Work through the average process with your kid: Add up all the baskets scored by that player, then divide by the number of games played. “Which are the best soccer teams in your league? What was their average score per game?” “That school seems to have big players on its football team! What do you suppose is the average weight of their players?”
Your role in this activity is finding frequent opportunities for your child to practice finding averages, whether calculating them in her head or using a calculator. At the same time, she can come to realize that figuring averages can be useful, providing interesting information and even some fun!