Perfect day for pennies

It has been a long week before vacation and I had planned on doing an activity with pennies in Algebra I.  It went well.  I asked the kids to bring in pennies.  We were going to look at the minted date and organize them by date, make a dot plot of them, and then see what we were going to notice some things.  I had the students predict the year that the most would be minted and predict the amount of pennies we were sorting as a class.

Here are some pictures: action shot: sorting the pennies

 Period 1- partial picture

Period 2 - picture

Period 1 - dot plot (The most popular was the year 2000.  We thought maybe they made more that year because of the year 2000?  We sorted 301 pennies.)

Period 2 - dot plot - I drew a line this time to be a little more even.  (The most popular year was 2013.   We sorted 292 pennies.)