When Uncle Norm tells Alanna and Kevin that the local ice cream shop is sold out of their favorite Choco Crunch ice cream, they set off to figure out why Bernie’s parlour can’t keep it in stock. They learn all about the MODE (the most frequent value) from a local hat vendor. When the day is done, Uncle Norm is “in the mode”.

The Gist: Children are introduced to one of the important measures of central tendency, the concept of mode: the number that occurs the most often in a set of data. Some examples of how the data can be presented include: tally charts, concrete graphs using models, pictographs, bar and circle graphs.