Graphing With First Grade

We are reviewing graphing skills this week in 4th grade. Graphing is always one of my favorite math concepts to explore with my students.  We do some of the typical graphing activities when we first introduce it- like graphing the colors of your M&Ms and group projects.  To fight the end of the year blahs and generate data with larger numbers, we decided to collaborate with our first grade friends who are also reviewing graphing this week (this was the brain child of the fab Brooke who also teaches 4th grade with me).  We broke our kids into small groups and each group was responsible for coming up with a question and at least 4 answer choices.  I asked my kids, "What do you want to know about the 1st graders at our school?"  After each group put their question and answer choices on a piece of butcher paper, we went around to all the first grade rooms to collect our data.  The first graders were working on tallying so the little ones took turns coming up to each group and answering their question by putting a tally mark on their answer choice.  To keep this organized, the 4th grade groups sat in different areas of the room with their butcher paper on the floor.  The 1st graders rotated in small groups until they answered each question.  Once we collected all our data, we returned to our room where the students worked on creating line graphs and bar graphs.  Later in the day, the first graders came and collected their own data with the big kids.  This was a great way for each grade level to model and practice their graphing skills.  And they all thought it was so cool-esp. the ones with older/younger siblings.