What are effective ways to introduce students to graphing and interpreting data?
The attached lesson provides an example of the video content.
We start on the first day of kindergarten introducing students to the idea of graphing. We create graphs to tell all about us, which helps us introduce ourselves to our new peers. This year already, we have made an eye color graph, a graph to show the number of people in our family, a graph to show which month our birthday is in, a graph to show our favorite animals, and a graph to show our favorite colors.
Some of these graphs are horizontal and some are vertical. I label both the X and Y axis with names so that the students can get used to seeing labels even in kindergarten on graphs. We look at the data together and analyze it. We usually stick to which item has the most and which item has the least amount of X’s or pictures next to it and circle the one that has the most so we can pick it out easily.
We also create graphs to vote as a class on rewards and we use graphs to show when we like or dislike something as we try new things throughout the year. I try to keep graphs in front of my students all the time, and one other way I do this is by having a graph to show the weather conditions each day. We color in a box indicating what the weather was like at recess and on the last day, we are in school of each month, we look over the data for the weather and talk about what kind of weather we had the most of the least of and if we notice any patterns from the month before. Then we can talk about seasonal changes and the patterns in the weather as well.
