The M&M Activity

Hey everyone!

Sorry it's been such a long time since I've posted. I've been so busy with school, work, and basically life itself. I'm taking a few classes that require me to buy a bunch of books, math, and a little bit of art in the mix.

I learned a new lesson that seemed really interesting. We learned how to use M&M's to make pictographs, bar graphs, and learn about different statistics in the class. The first part of the lesson was to get a regular bag of M&M's (the individual size one). Then you count how many colored M&M's you have in your bag. I accidentally grabbed the huge bag of them, so my numbers were out of this world. I just used a cup full of M&M's and grabbed data that way.

Before we grabbed other people's numbers, there were some things to think about like if they were distributed equally or not. We also had to think about which colors would come up more often or not.

Next, we got all the numbers from different people in the class and saw the results. The results were pretty different but there was one color that some people had the same amount. It made me think if they were distributed in the same way all over the country.

Then, we looked and saw which colors would come up more often than others. I thought that brown would come up more often because it would be an "easy" color to make. The least I thought would be yellow.

After that, we made a pictograph of the data from our bag. A pictograph is a graph with little circles or whatever picture of the object you're using (an example was from my homework and they were baseballs instead of plain circles.) With a pictograph, you have a circle represent a number because you can't draw 26 individual circles without the graph being big. We used the number 15. So, each circle represented 15 M&M's. We colored in each color with the circles with the corresponding number from the data.

After we put our data on the pictograph, it was time to eat the M&M's! Yummy.

During this activity, we didn't just use pictographs. We used what was also called a "dot plot" graph. A dot plot graph is just like a line graph, but we place little "x"s above the number. We used the dot plot graph for the numbers of each person with however many colors of M&M's. An example would be that someone had 26 reds, 16 blues, 15 yellows, 12 greens, and 11 browns. That person would put each number on their own dot plot graph. Also, each color has its own dot plot graph as well.

The last type of graph we used for this lesson was the horizontal bar graph. On the vertical part of the graph we had the colors of the M&M's. On the horizontal part of the graph we had the number of how many were in each bag. We used the number 20 for the horizontal part of the graph. 

All of the graphs represented the frequency of colors in an M&M's bag. They are all excellent ways to show kiddos how frequent something can occur and show them how to organize data.

The overall understanding of this assignment was to show people that there are many ways to show your data and help organize your numbers in each set. I really liked this little project because it showed me different ways to make a graph. I didn't know about the dot plot at all. I knew what a pictograph was but I didn't know the details about it, like having the picture represent a number like 15 or 20. 

Here's a video on how to make a dot plot graph! I loved this video because it showed in detail on how to make one. 

Here's a link to use different templates to make graphs as well. This resource is really good for showing a specific age group some different types of graphs for their data. 

I hope y'all have a great day!!