Graphing Ideas

I was thrilled to here positive feedback on my post about ordering and comparing numbers!  Thanks for reading! I was asked by a reader if I had any ideas about graphing.  Graphing is on of my favortie math concepts to teach.  Most of the data we graph is student centered.  We practice writing tally marks while we collect our data.  I ask a question and give some options such as what is your favorite sport.  The students come up a few at a time and make a tally mark by their choice (or sometimes we use post-its to create a fast bar graph).  We do A LOT of modeling and I pretend to forget to label my axis or give my graph a title. Of course I love to use food so I will give each student a packet of skittles and we graph the colors.  After we practice graphing a lot, we do a data project.  I break the kids into groups.  I either give them a topic and have them come up with a question (one year the topic was sleep and some questions were how many hours do you sleep a night, what do you wear to sleep, etc) or I have the kids pick a question out of a bag.  They must come up with their answer choices and decide how they wil poll the class.  Then they collect their data! After collecting their data, they make a line graph, a pictograph, a bar graph, and line plot with it.  Then they present it to the class.  I might have a rubric somewhere- I will get back to you on that.  I have also divided kids into groups and given each group the same data.  One group made a line graph, one group made a bar graph and so on.  Last year for a graphing review we teamed up with a first grade class.  You can read about it here.  Hope these ideas help.  Feel free to ask questions.