Jumping Jacks Graph

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Objectives:
-Students will collect data and create corresponding graphs.
-Students will interpret collected data and graphs.

Introduction:
This lesson was gleaned from when I was a college student observing teachers in the classroom, and provides the students with a very physical experiences that they can relate to math.

The lesson involves students doing jumping jacks for 2 minutes while their group records the data every 5 seconds. In order to give the students ownership of their work each student in the group will do their own jumping jacks and record their own data.

After the data is collected and graphed students then are asked a few simple questions about their graphs.

Setup:
Explain to your students how there will be 4 people in a group with 4 roles that will be shared among all 4 group members at least once. If there is only enough students for a group of 3, have one group member hold two roles.

The roles are timer, counter, recorder, and jumper.

The timer looks at the clock and yells “TIME!” every 5 seconds. Role modeling this with you class for 15 seconds helps them understand what this role looks like.

The counter simply counts the jumping jacks and tells the recorder what number they are on every time they here the timer yell “TIME!”. Instruct the counter to only count full jumping jacks.

The recorder fills in the table while the counter provides them with the numbers.

The jumper simply does as many jumping jacks in two minutes as they can. Instruct the class what a good jumping jack looks like and what a poor jumping jack looks like. Arms all the way up, and legs stretched out to form a triangle.”

After your explanation of the roles, demonstrate what the students will be doing by doing the jumping jacks yourself. Select a student to be the timer for you, another student sitting close to that student to be the counter, and another student next to the counter to be the recorder.

Do the jumping jacks for the full two minutes. If one of your selected students isn’t doing their role correctly; stop, re-explain their role to the class and start over. As you do your jumping jacks your students’ anxiety about doing jumping jacks in front of their peers will subside and you will get better participation. Have fun with it as well, set a challenge towards the students to see if they can beat your total; this too will give them another positive incentive to participate.

After your two minutes are up separate the students into groups and let your students get to work. Rule of thumb is that you select your students’ groups for them, but this activity has proven that it works better if the students can work with people they are 100% comfortable with, so generally let the students pick their own groups for the activity.

Expected Student Behavior:
It will be noisy, especially the first 3 minutes, however; if you listen to the students conversations they are simply excited about the task and are trying to select who is doing what first. Some groups get straight into the jumping, whereas some students take a while longer deciding who wants to go first, but generally you will have near 100% participation if setup correctly.

Some students will not realize that everyone is going to eventually be doing the jumping jacks, so you may have to readdress the issue with the class.

Generally every group finishes within 5 minutes of one another. After the groups finish the jumping jacks the students will start to graph their data and answer the questions.

Possible Class Discussion:
After the students are done with the assignment some possible ideas for class discussion are:
1)Given any time, how can we use the graph to find the number of jumping jacks? For example: number of jumping jacks at 23 seconds.
2)How might we use the graph to predict how many jumping jacks could be done after 3 minutes?
3)What does the slope of the graph tell us about the rate of jumping jacks?
4)How does time and the number of jumping jacks relate to x and y?

Accommodations:
Unless you offer an alternative activity, very few students will refuse to do the jumping jacks; however, if you have students with a physical disability , social disability, or otherwise; simply have them do something else that they could collect data on: such as how many times can they dribble a basketball with their left hand while standing straight up. Or how many times could they yo yo a yo yo. Or how many times can they write their first name with their left hand.

Also if you have any student who was absent, simply prepare some pseudo data for them to record, have them graph the data and answer the questions as if it were their own.

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