This is the first time Math Language Routine 5: Co-Craft Questions is suggested in this course. In this routine, students are given a context or situation, often in the form of a problem stem (for example, a story, image, video, or graph) with or without numerical values. Students develop mathematical questions that can be asked about the situation. A typical prompt is: “What mathematical questions could you ask about this situation?" The purpose of this routine is to allow students to make sense of a context before feeling pressure to produce answers, and to develop students’ awareness of the language used in mathematics problems.

The purpose of this Warm-up is to elicit the idea of how a frequency table and dot plot are connected, which will be useful when students create dot plots in a later activity. While students may think of questions about many aspects of these representations, the connections between the summaries of the data are the important discussion points.

This prompt gives students opportunities to see and make use of structure (MP7). The specific structure they might notice is how the frequency for a value is related to the number of dots above the value in the number line on the dot plot.

The goal of this discussion is for students to consider more mathematical questions about the data.

Invite several partners to share one question with the class, and record responses. Ask the class to make comparisons among the shared questions and their own. Ask, “What do these questions have in common? How are they different?” Listen for and amplify language related to the learning goal, such as “How are the dot plot and frequency table related?” or “How can you use a frequency table to make a dot plot?”

In a previous course, students learned to construct dot plots and histograms. In this activity, students construct a human dot plot to represent class data, which gives a concrete way to interpret the meaning of this representation. Students reason abstractly and quantitatively (MP2) when they interpret information about their class by answering questions about the data set.

Questions for data collection aren’t printed in the task. They are suggested in the Launch so that they can be customized for each class.

Each student should work to create the dot plot from the data collected from the class. Students should collaborate with their partner when answering the questions about the data set. Monitor for students’ strategies for expressing the typical amount of sleep (some may calculate mean, and some may calculate median). Highlight that the two ideas of “typical” for a given data set will be emphasized in later lessons.

This activity will help students when they analyze data in a later lesson. It also gives them practice with collecting data from classmates, and representing it with a graph, which is a skill they will use throughout the unit.