Use information about the students in the classroom, such as height. Instruct students to stand at the front of the room, ordering themselves from tallest to shortest. Have them find the student right in the middle and explain that this is the median student. Divide the class into tall and short halves and explain how to find the middle of each half, which is the quartile. Identify the lower and upper endpoints, which will be the tallest and shortest person. Explain that in a box and whisker plot, the box runs from quartile to quartile and the whiskers run from quartile to endpoint. Have students return to their seats and model creating a box and whisker plot on paper. Draw a number line that begins before and ends after the endpoints. Then plot the median, quartiles and endpoints on the line. Next, draw the box from quartile to quartile and draw a line through the median. Finally, draw the whiskers from quartile to endpoint.
Choose a theme that interests the children. Illuminations.org suggests NBA statistics. Once students understand the concepts of median, quartiles, lower endpoints and upper endpoints, choose a basketball team and instruct students to find each of these for all numbered players. Model constructing a box and whisker plot from the weight data and then have the students practice with height. Have them predict what will happen if they remove the tallest player and then examine the effect that change makes and compare it to their prediction. They should find that the median remains the same, but the mean height changes significantly.
Use a bed sheet to engage kinesthetic and visual learning styles and to allow students to better picture the spatial meaning of box and whisker plots. Collect data from students such as shoe size or age in months and then determine the median, quartiles, lower endpoint and upper endpoint. Line students up at the front of the room and instruct the student who is the lower quartile median to hold one end of a bed sheet and the upper quartile median to hold the other end. Have the student who is the median hold the sheet where she stands. Explain to students that the sheet the students are holding represents half the class and that this is the information in a box and whisker plot, with the fourth on the far left and the fourth on the far right outside of the box. Then have students return to their seats and create the box and whisker plot on paper.
Access a Smart Board and use the interactive box and whisker lesson provided by SMARTtech.com. Middle-school students are easily engaged with interactive technology, and the lesson provided by Smart Technologies is fun and interesting. Stories, songs, videos and worksheets to help teach middle school students box and whisker plots are also available on sites such as onlinemathlearning.com.
Internet sites such as ExploreLearning.com provide online games, which are a fun way to practice creating box and whisker plots. Mrnussbaum.com has graph generators that allow students to gather information from friends and family and then enter it on the website, which creates a box and whisker plot with the statistics. A game called "Create a Graph" is provided by the National Center for Education Statistics at nces.ed.gov, where students can also enter information for box and whisker plots.