Lesson Plan: Who Has the Longest First Name?

This investigation was originally published in Bridging the Gap Between Common Core State Standards and Teaching Statistics by Pat Hopfensperger, Tim Jacobbe, Deborah Lurie, and Jerry Moreno.

(Grade 6 – Common Core State Standards: 6.SP.1-4) This investigation is based on one found in the Appendix for Level A in Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE): A Pre-K–12 Curriculum Framework.

During the first week of school, a third-grade teacher is trying to help her students learn one another’s names by playing various games. During one of the games, a student named MacKenzie noticed she and her classmate Zacharius each have nine letters in their names. MacKenzie conjectured that their names were longer than everyone else’s names, which gave the teacher an opportunity to introduce a statistics lesson.

In this investigation, students analyze the length (number of letters) of their first names. The data will be organized and displayed in dotplots to develop the median as a measure of center and the range as a measure of variability of first name lengths.

Keywords: Grade 6, CCSS 6.SP.1, 6.SP.2, 6.SP.3, 6.SP.4, dotplots, median, range
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