Making Graphing Fun!

With the current state of the world at the moment, we are being inundated daily with graphs giving us all sorts of information. What a great opportunity to take this further!

As teachers, we have all spent time during the year ‘doing graphs’ with our students.

My experience has been that each year when the kids are covering graphing, they do it as a separate block and that’s it for the year.

They can also accurately predict pretty much what they will be doing, and we can predict exactly what graphs they will do.

· What’s your favourite colour?

· What’s your favourite animal?

· What’s your favourite TV show?

· What team do you barrack for?

· Etc

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with these, but if our kids are doing the same thing year after year, where is the challenge and motivation to take it further and develop deeper thinking?

The questions they are asking are often fairly shallow and easy, and the respondents are not challenged to think about their answers, or discuss with the other child the type of question they are asking.

Of course, children in younger classes will ask these more basic questions as that is where their developmental level is, but do children still need to be asking these questions a few years later? I think not, so here are some ideas I have used with great success, and which encourage children to use graphing at all stages of the year.

I believe that they could see an opportunity to create graphs every day based on what they see, hear and do and what information they experience through the news and media.

Even through their own wonderings.

Recently in a Gr 5/6 class I set the challenge (after discussing my graphing thoughts with them first!) to create a graph that has never been done before.

This meant that their question needed to be one that they believed had never been asked before, and they rose to the occasion!!

Among some of the questions being asked were:

· What is the greatest problem facing our planet right now?

· Which of the 5 senses is the most necessary?

· Which animal is facing extinction the most out of these?

· If you ruled the world for a day, what rule would you introduce?

· Which of these powers would you like to have the most?

Rather than leave the responses totally open (otherwise we could get 25 different answers) the children listed 5-6 responses for others to choose from.

From the 25 children in the class, I was thrilled to see that I had never been asked any of those questions before, and they really made me think and have a discussion about the question itself, and the options provided.

More importantly, it was great to see the levels of engagement from the children and the way that they were interacting with each other as they responded to the questions put before them.

Now to put the information together!!

Rather than doing the traditional Bar Graph, which they were still free to do, we looked at other ways of displaying our results. I stressed that they were free to create their own graphs, but that there were other options available also.

I was hoping to get the idea about doing Pie Graphs from them (their teacher had asked me to do some work on angles) which thankfully came up pretty quickly. I also didn’t want to just do a lot of measuring of angles without any real intent or purpose, so by including the graphing aspect we were able to cover even more of the curriculum.

The process..

1. Each child went and asked each person in the class to respond to their question. In order to keep track of who they asked, they put each child’s initials/name down beside the option they chose.

2. We had already been through how to measure angles the day before, so they were familiar with how to use a protractor, and that a circle consisted of 360 degrees. Because we surveyed 25 people, we needed to know how many degrees each person was worth on our pie graph. To do this we divided 360 by 25

360 ¸ 25 = 14.4

So, if 6 people chose Option 1 6 x 14.4= 86.4 degrees (rounded down to 86)

4 chose Option 2 4 x 14.4 = 57.6 degrees (rounded up to 58)

5 chose Option 3 5 x 14.4 = 72 degrees (left at 72)

7 chose Option 4 7 x 14.4 = 100.8 degrees (rounded up to 101)

3 chose Option 5 3 x 14.4 = 43.2 degrees (rounded down to 43)

This adds up to 360 degrees

3. As it is too difficult to measure an 86.4 degree angle, we did some rounding up/down to whole numbers. Where the total came to just below/above 360, we added/subtracted a degree of some/all responses, which didn’t really change the overall results at all. We just had to get to a total of 360 degrees.

4. The children then created their pie graphs, and didn’t need to write down their totals as the shading of the graphs told the story.

5. To add to their displays, they also presented their information in two other graphs on the same page, to show what their results looked like in different formats. There were line graphs, bar graphs (vertical, horizontal, and with spaces in between columns as well) as well as pictographs and doughnut to name a few.

This activity is rich in the fact that it remains open ended while still incorporating some closed tasks such as measuring angles.

Once they constructed their pie graph, most were more inclined to experiment with other graph forms, and construct new surveys with questions that had not been asked before.

Taking this further…

· Come up with a daily question to survey your family with

- What would you prefer for tea tonight?

- Our family movie today will be…

- Which country is in the most news articles today?

- Which room in our home has the most items in it>

- Which colour of clothes pegs do we have the most of?

- Who will go to the fridge the most today?

- Who will need to charge their device first?

Even just looking at the weather page in the newspaper is a rich source of information for graphing ideas ( and so many other maths tasks that I will elaborate on in future posts)

If you have other ideas to add, please feel free to do so in the comments section, I'd love to see how you go (and so would many others!!)