Lesson plan to teach statistical literacy to elementary school students

Today, I'm taking a break from blogging about college teaching and sharing a mini-lesson I created for elementary school-aged students.

I am sharing my activity here because I bet I'm not the only college instructor who has been asked to do community outreach with kids, be it at local STEM festivals, children's museums, or elementary school career exploration days. Feel free to take this idea and run with it.

I taught this lesson as part of the Wonder Time series at my local children's museum, Erie Children's Museum in Erie, PA. My friend, Claire, is a former stats student and former STEM teacher at my kids' school. She is the current education director at the museum. PS: I love my small town life, and the museum is just a few blocks from my workplace. 

A description of the Wonder Time series

 My question was, "How do number experts predict the future?"

As I put together my lesson, I was inspired by all the different ways instructors are already using sticky notes (and dot stickers and Legos...) to create interactive data visualizations in the classroom. See:

In the end, I created an activity where we would use birth month data to help local companies plan for trends in birthday-party-related purchases.

I created X and Y axes with the painter's tape on a wall in the museum. Along the X axis, I added months. Next, students (and museum employees) added their birthdays to the graph using sticky notes. The museum already had all of this fairly inexpensive material on hand.

A Colorful data viz created with stuff you can find at Dollar Tree

I had a dry-erase board as well, and I created lists of the kids' responses to the following questions:

1) What supplies do you need for a birthday party? It worked best to ask for very specific items, typically decorations, food, and games they would like to have at their own parties.

2) Where can you buy those supplies? I tried to get the kids to think about shopping at local stores rather than online so we could keep the data's applicability local.

3) Where are the places in Erie where you have gone for birthday parties that weren't at someone's house? The kids listed local favorites, including the museum itself, bowling alleys, trampoline parks, the local zoo, arcades, laser tag arenas, our local state park, etc.

After we generated the lists, I asked the students questions about when local businesses should hire more employees to help with birthday parties. During what months should local businesses order more birthday supplies? During which season should local pizzerias put together special packages for birthday parties? They were able to look at our chart and predict when the most birthday parties would occur and when businesses should expect to make the most money if they had the proper supplies in stock. We also talked about how birthday party locations would need to hire more cleaners, cooks, supervisors, etc. 

I explained to the kids that there are lots of businesses and employees who want to make money and hire people. To do this, they need to make good choices, and those choices can be informed by data.

Finally, the museum decided to keep the display up for the day, and we left this sign up for visitors to interact with the birthday bar graph on their own: