This week I started teaching Line of Best Fit, and it's one of my favorite units! I love that it includes all the little skills they've been learning about linear equations, and lets them see and practice the applications. Here's a list of activities I take them through in this unit...
1) Starburst Activity by Math=Love (click here)
This activity was super fun as an intro! Essentially the students are learning how to make a scatterplot, what a correlation is, and how to make a line to fit the data. The correlation in this particular activity is between the students hand span, and the number of startburst they can pick up. One thing I would have done differently after doing this with my class is gather some data from smaller kids to add into the data. The range in size of my students hands wasn't very big so it was a little challenging seeing the correlation. I teach at a k-12 school and bringing in some younger students to measure and add to the data would have been fun for everyone. I'll for sure be doing that next time!
2) E-Commerce Practice

In this activity, I like for my students to think deeply about the meaning of the "slope". When they calculate that m=170 (or close to that), they then have to reason about what it MEANS. I want them to be able to communicate that m=170 means, for every 1 dollar in advertising, we can expect 170 dollars in sales. Once they can do that, they understand the relevance and important of knowing that information and using it for future projections.
3) Use DESMOS to graph a Line of Best Fit!
This is so much fun because it gives the students true application! The reality is that in real life, technology is being used to analyze data in this way. Teach your students how to use the technology effectively, and use it as a tool for analyzing data sets, I show my students this video from YouTube, and then use the following data sets to practice:
One other thing you'll want to teach them is how to adjust their calculator windows. One easy way is click the little "Zoom Fit" button at the bottom of the table which will
automatically do it for them! So Cool!

4) "When Will I Ever Use This?!" Baseball Project
At the end of our unit, this is the project my students will do! You can find it here, or in the Math Teachers Lounge Membership.
Task: Student becomes a sports statistician, looking at baseball stats to make projections about future outcomes. The project is split into two parts.
In part 1, the student will look at "At Bats" vs "Hits" of the top 10 hitters, graphing and finding the line of best fit to calculate the slope and project future hits on number of at bats.
In part 2, students look at the strikeout/walk ratio of the top 8 pitchers in the MLB. The project also includes instructions on using the digital tool Desmos to find the equation of the Line of Best most accurately.
I hope you find something here you can take to your classroom and make your Line of Best Fit Unit even better!!
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