Finding Mean and Range

Since Monday was a rainy day we had the students weigh themselves. We then arranged students from least to most weight. We had the 4th and 5th grade students find the mean or average weight of the class. On Tuesday we used the times of relay races to find the average time. To accomplish this the students had to figure out how many would go into each group. They also had to operate the stopwatch. After running three or four races we found what was the average time. For instance in one group the time for the total race was 46 seconds for a team of three. The students then had to figure out that they needed to divide 46 by 3 to get an average time of 15.3 seconds. We discussed that not every person ran the race in 15.3 seconds but rather that was the average time. We related that to the stats that are given on a football player ie. running back x ran the ball 5 times for an average of 4 yards per run.