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©1998 University Child Development School and Bonnie Campbell Hill. No part of the Continuum may be reproduced or used without written permission of University Child Development School. Continuum adapted by University Child Development School with permission from Bonnie Campbell Hill.
In this Math Vitamin, students are given data to organize into a graph, which they then use to answer questions and interpret results.
Story: Rosie's class tried out using their sense of touch just like we did yesterday. Graphs are a visual way to organize data and show results.
Inspired by Granny Torelli Makes Soup by Sharon Creech; HarperCollins, 2005
Suggested manipulatives: Colored markers/pencils, Unifix cubes or any type of countable object (little plastic teddy bears, beans etc...).
Prep time: 15 minutes, as you are actually creating the grid information for the students to interpret.
Classroom time: Asking children to do their best work for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another task available (writing, free exploration, etc.) for those students who finish work prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.
How to individualize/stretch: For students who are just beginning to work with graphing, have them recreate the graph data with countable objects instead of initially working with paper and pens. Let them actually see the objects and then begin solving the questions. Using the actual items is a more concrete way for students to begin learning this skill of interpreting data. For those students who are more familiar with reading graphs, increase the complexity of the data, the questions and the types of graphs (pie chart, line graph etc...).