Averaging With Legos

 I was talking to Choclo and Oob about averaging numbers, and they were a bit baffled by the concept.  I realized that this is one of those home schooled things: school kids have their grades averaged all the time, so they are very familiar with the idea.

We don't really use grades that way.  We just stick with a concept until they understand it and can do it easily (or get tired of it, and  circle back to it later).

But we are very familiar with the concept of Legos!

I made little stacks of Legos for the minifigs.

How can we make the stacks even, with the same number of stacks?  When I didn't use the minifigs, the tendency was just to combine stacks.

After a while of just moving the blocks, I show them that we can add up all the blocks, then divide them by the number of little people.


First we physically do this with the blocks, then we do it on paper.

When you understand what you are actually doing when you are averaging numbers, it's easy!

I do love the Math-U-See blocks also, but Legos work really well as math manipulatives.  They aren't quite as easy to use for some kinds of math, but they give you an added fun factor that's hard to beat!