I'm wondering how other people do graphing in your classrooms. What materials do you use? How often do you do it? Any information would be appreciated! Thanks!
I use graphing throughout the year with a variety of materials (food, toys, etc.), but I consider our weather graph to be the most beneficial in helping my students. Each morning we graph the weather and I say, "Tell me 3 things about our graph." Later on in the year, I have students generate questions to ask about the graph, and other students have to answer them. My kids are awesome at graphing, and I know it's because of our daily weather activities!
That's what I'm trying to do.....make them better at graphing. I'm thinking it's going to have to be something we do more often to make their skills increase. Blech.
We graph throughout the year and we do the weather everyday. Thanksgiving we graph our favorite foods at Thanksgiving, we will graph how many letters we have in our name, graph by fruit loops by color etc... They love it.
A couple times a week I will have cups that are labeled on my table and when they come in they put their name (which is on a popsicle stick) in the cup to vote. So if we are reading a story, which character is your favorite? Or which ocean animal, which vegetable? Sometimes I'll also do it on a big dry erase board-make a t-chart and they write their name in-yes or no. When we do math we count the votes and then graph the results. I love making pictographs-so we turn our milk cartons into houses and they glue it on for if the live in a house or apartment-things like that. I need to get better about integrating the graphing more often this year as well. I feel like it should be a daily thing.
Yeah, I'm thinking we need to do something more on a daily basis as well. I'll have to keep thinking about it. Our kids come in at different times each day, from 7:30-8:30, and that's a long time to have to keep track of whether or not they've answered the question of the day or whatever. Gonna have to think more about this......
I did graphing every day as part of our morning routine. I would draw the graph on the board and pick a random topic (at the end of the year I would have a student decide what we were going to graph). I would write their name on the graph which helped when I was doing attendance while they were gone. We would always answer which one had more or less. We would also figure out how many more or less they had which can be hard for them to figure out. By the time graphing became a tested skill they had it mastered.
I do different graphing activities all throughout the year. The first or second week when we learn about senses we graph each students' eye color. We also graph family pets, the kind of shoes we are wearing on a particular day (tennis shoes, boots, flipflops, etc), favorite ice cream, favorite pizza topping, favorite fall leaf color, favorite classroom center. We complete our weather graph every morning for each month. Once we discuss all the seasons, we graph our favorite season. I have an activity where we graph m&m's, fruitloops, and Valentine candy hearts.
This site gives you some wonderful ideas (with pictures) for graphing. http://kidscount1234.com/ Scroll down to graphing on the left side of the screen.
I would always graph the weather and the daily question of the day that was always a yes or no answer.
