We MEAN it!

We sure do! We MEAN it! Mean is the average of a group of numbers. We can find the average, or mean, of numbers by following two easy steps!

Mrs. Johnson taught us about mean over the last couple of days. She began by asking us all to reach one hand in the basket to pull out some blocks. She didn't give us a specific number...we just reached in and grabbed some. In case you haven't met our class, we LOVE anything hands-on. As we reached in to pull out blocks, we giggled and wondered what in the world we were going to do! Surely fourth graders had no business playing with building blocks! Ha!

Once everyone had their blocks in front of them, Mrs. Johnson asked us to write on our Post-it note to tell how many blocks we pulled out. Easy enough.

Next, she asked us to write down how many blocks each person in our group had chosen. So, we listed our group members and the number of blocks each person had chosen. Still pretty easy.

Mrs. Johnson then asked us how we could find out how many blocks our whole table had. Add, of course! So, we did. We showed how we could find the total number of blocks at our table. Easy still.

After that, Mrs. Johnson said that she wanted everyone to have an equal number of cubes. Now, how can we figure that out? Divide! So, we divided our total number of blocks by the number of people in our group. D'Aubriney's group had 35 blocks. If they all wanted an equal amount of blocks, they would have to divide 35 by 5 because there are five people in her group. Each person would receive 7 blocks! Not hard at all!

After we finished, Mrs. Johnson told us that we completed our lesson without her even teaching. What? I really think this Spring weather is getting to her! She explained to us that MEAN is the average of a group of numbers. Average is the amount if everything is spread out evenly. Just like our blocks!

There are two steps to finding the MEAN.

1. Add the numbers (or blocks) together.
2. Divide the total by the number of numbers (or group members). The answer is the MEAN!

Now, that's easy!

Mrs. Johnson uses MEAN to find our grades for our report cards. She taught us how to find our own grade at the end of a nine weeks. All we have to do is add all our grades together and divide the total by the number of grades.

Maybe we should all average our own grades next time. You know, just to give Mrs. Johnson a break. No really. We MEAN it!