I discovered the books, “If the World Were A Village” by David Smith at a local math conference two years ago. I would love to explore the math in this books with my class but have not come up with a good lesson for it yet. I am posting about this now to get my links together, inspire myself, and maybe get some ideas from the amazing math teachers that read my blog.
If you have lessons or activities surrounding this concept, please share them in the comments with me! Once I get something together, I will tell you all about it.
Links I like about 100:
- “If the World Were A Village” by David Smith
- Miniature Earth YouTube movie with music
- 100 People, A World Portrait
- 20 Color Posters using statistics on 100 people
Please share links if you have any.
I Speak Math 
I’ve used that before loosely. Introduced as an idea, then students brainstormed what else they’d like to see like that. Got ideas that were in between, like school, town, state and US, and smaller groups like class or grade level. Great proportional reasoning task, or % work. Did state and country and compared to world. (Easiest to get data for.)
John – you’ve just given me an idea about a project I’m working on. Thanks!
Last year with my 8th graders, I used a lesson that I found from Illuminations titled, “The Next Billion. This had students calculate and predict when the population of the world would reach 7 billion based on population growth trends.
http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L715
I could see using this lesson along with the 100 people information above, by having students use proportions given the real world population data in 2011. Students can calculate the exact number for each category (children/adults, nationality, etc.) and then use research the real data to check for its accuracy.
Jaime – Thanks so much! I love that activity. It will be great to do when we are learning conversions (and can also review scientific notation).
Did you ever adapt John’s idea for use in your classroom? I’m working on something like that right now and would love to know what you did.
No. I didn’t yet! I would still love to though. 🙂
Ha! just found this via google and tweeted you about it Julie! Then I read the comments and saw that Alisan just posted about this a few weeks ago. I am working on something, I will pass it along if I can make it work!
Thanks for blogging about it! I’m so excited to try it!