Fun Math Icebreaker Activity

I love reading through the DynaMath Teacher’s Guide for lesson planning and teaching tips. One differentiation tip suggested a fun activity that has students measure each other’s heights and graph the results.

To begin, I placed my students into small groups to measure their heights (in inches). Students had to work together, take turns measuring each other with yard sticks or rulers, and record their findings. I had a volunteer from each group come up to the SmartBoard to display the height data for his or her group. Then each group had to discuss how they should best organize the data to create a bar graph.  

To help students draw their graphs, we viewed an instructional DynaMath video, “All About Graphs,” to reinforce understanding of how people use graphs in the real world.

Then I had each group create their first draft of their bar graphs. As I walked around the room to check for understanding, I noticed that their bar graphs looked like city skylines from a distance. Realizing this could make for a great bulletin board display, I challenged them to color their bar graphs to reflect a city skyline. They enjoyed coming up with their own names for their cities, such as “Sunset Heights” or “Supreme Heights.” It was a fun and enjoyable activity to reinforce measurement and graphing.