Step Up to the Percentage Plate

Reading a chart that shows numbers and statistics sounds boring, doesn’t it? How about if the chart shows baseball stats for your child’s favorite team? Now that’s a fun way to explore the relationship between decimals, fractions, and percents! Taking data and showing it in various ways helps strengthen your child’s data collection and analysis skills.

By exploring how different ways of representing data relate to one another, students are extending their knowledge of decimals, fractions, and percents. Here’s a fun at-home activity that will help your child strengthen his ability to work with and interpret data in various forms.

What You Need:

• Sports page of a newspaper or online access to baseball data
• Paper
• Pencil

What You Do:

Step 1: Have your child check the "Box Scores" in the newspaper for two baseball teams playing a game against each other. Box Scores are a condensed version of the game's events, expressed in data points which can be confusing to look at, but very informative if you know what you are looking at. Identify the data for each player AB (at bat) and H (number of hits).

Step 2: Now it's time to find out who the sluggers are! Show your child how to use these numbers to show each player’s ratio of hits compared to the times at bat. This will show how effective the hitter was in this particular game. It works like this: if a player is at bat 4 times and hits 3 times, he gets a hit 75% of the time, which is equal to 3/4 times or 0.75 times.