Grade 6 Math Activities

Percents are often used to talk about and calculate taxes, tips, and sale prices. However, they are also used to talk about chances: how likely it is that something will or will not happen. You’ve heard the weather forecaster talk about a 64% chance of rain. What does that mean? We all know that either it will rain or it won’t. Yes or no. How can there be a percent chance of rain? This activity can help your child answer this question, by involving her in exploring the meaning of percents in probability.

	Clipboard or spiral notebook

	Calculator

	Pen or pencil

Begin by asking your child to come up with ideas for surveys. Surveys often involve asking people questions. They can also involve simple observations. Surveys are related to chances because they involve only a sample. You ask a sample of people questions, but you don't ask all people. Chance comes into play because chances are that a larger group will give the same answers or results as the small group sampled. The match between groups is more likely when the sample is large.

Any survey needs to have a limited number of possible responses. This is important to keep in mind when coming up with survey questions and thinking about possible responses. For example, a survey of the hair color of people walking down the street on a particular day at a specific time has a limited number of responses: black, brown, blond, gray, white, red. However, there could be the occasional purple or green hair. These colors could be put in a category of “other.”

It's best to begin with surveys that have only two possible responses, like rain and no rain. Chances are easier to calculate that way. Here are some ideas for survey questions that have just two responses. Some are to be asked; others can be observed in a public place.

	Do you like eggplant? (yes, no)

	Are you older or younger than 25? (older, younger)

	Are people wearing shoes or sandals? (shoes, sandals)

	Are people walking to the left or to the right? (left, right)

As your child gathers data, by either asking people questions or just watching them in a public place, she needs to keep the data organized. Making tally marks in two columns is an easy and quick way to do it. Once your child gathers enough data (and you might want to decide how much is enough beforehand — 30? 50? 100 people?), chances can then be calculated.

Calculating the chances can be done by dividing the number of people who answered each way by the total number of people. (Remember that a result of 0.125 is the same as 12.5%.) This calculation will give a percent for each answer, and the two percents should add up to 100% (all the people).

You can use the data to predict the chance of the next person’s response. For example, if 28% of the people who passed by are wearing sandals, then there is a 28% chance that the next person who walks by will be wearing sandals.

After your child has worked on questions that have only two answers, encourage her to conduct surveys using questions that have several answers. However, ask your child to list out the possible answers beforehand and to keep the possibilities limited (by giving people choices or grouping less popular responses as “other”). Here are some examples of questions to use:

	What is your favorite ice cream?

	What is your favorite summer activity?

	Are people wearing pants, skirts, dresses, or shorts?

	Are people smiling, frowning, looking bored, or other (as you pass them on a crowded city street)?

Your child can calculate the results of these surveys in a similar way as she did the previous ones. How do the new results compare? The results can also be graphed. Circle graphs are perfect for this kind of data. Learning about data, percents, and chances will give your child an important base for understanding probability and statistics.

 Grade 6 Math Activities