Graph Puzzles

A great way to help kids understand the components of a graph and how all the parts "fit together" is to make puzzles out of the graphs you've made together in class and have the students practice putting the puzzles together. I transferred the information from the large graphs we made as a class to smaller paper. I just quickly hand wrote these, made copies and cut them apart. (I am not too fancy as you may have noticed :) As they build the puzzles, you'll hear groups using saying things like, "This is the title. It goes at the top." OR "The numbers have to go in counting order at the bottom." We used these puzzles earlier in the year, but as the year progresses, I'll cut the puzzles into more pieces. I think kids need A LOT of practice with puzzles to build thinking, reasoning and memory skills anyway so why not get the most bang for your buck? I have added these puzzles to my graphing work station. The kids really like doing them. One tip...make sure to copy each graph on different colored paper or mark the back of each piece with a unique color or symbol so if the pieces of different puzzles get mixed up, it's easy for the kids to sort out. Mark a plastic bag with the matching color or symbol for storage.

Calendar Time Weather

We discuss 4 components of the weather every day during calendar time. I have two students who are responsible for giving a report on the temperature, cloud cover, precipitation and wind speed for the week. Since my classroom is right next to the outside door, these two students us a small silver pom pom to hold up in the wind to determine if the wind is calm, breezy or gusty. They simply observe the sky to see if the sky is clear, partly cloudy or overcast. Then we are fortunate to have a thermometer inside our classroom that shows both the inside and outside temperatures which they can easily read. The students make their report, and we record the information on the graphs pictured above. I've merged some store bought things with some things of my own design...pretty simple but gets the job done. We keep track of each day's temperature using a color coded system for hot, warm, cool and cold and transfer the information to a year-long graph sorted by month so that we can study the color trends and identify weather patterns through the seasons. We also use this weather time to practice counting on the thermometer by 5's and 2's and to discuss "greater than" and "less than" with relevance to actual temperatures. The graph pictured only shows August, but our graph now has red (hot), orange (warm) and green(cool) temperatures recorded showing how the weather temperature is getting cooler as we move into Fall. (Not that cool though...We do live in Texas and it's only almost Halloween. ;)

Shoes, Birthdays, Favorite Fruits...All About Graphing

Since the first day of school we've been working on collecting, sorting and graphing data -transitioning from real object to picture to bar graphs. Above are just a few photos of the types of graphing we have done. The students enjoy the added relevance of conducting their own surveys to collect information... especially being allowed to go talk to friends and carrying their own clipboards. :) In the first picture we graphed our shoes sorting between those with laces and those without laces. The yardstick represents the line we draw when comparing two amounts to see how many more or less one is than the other. The second photos are pics of our class picture birthday graph. The last few photos show the kids in action completing a survey about Favorite Fruit. The students learn to use tally marks as they ask 10 friends to choose a favorite fruit from the list and then create a bar graph to show their results. The students then compare all of the results and we discuss similarities and differences between the different graphs. Finally, the students will write questions about their graph using question stems I provide, trade with a partner and answer each other's questions.