South East 1 Math: What a Graph Could Mean

Brian's Grade 6 class has been reviewing the "text features" of a graph. They have also been talking about how graphs can be used to display data that represents a small group of people, or a large group of people.

His Minds On was getting his class to look at a graph (Via the ELMO) that had no "text features" on it. They talked about what was missing and then gave examples of what they might be. Brian recorded these things on an anchor chart to be used as their unit carries on.

For the Action part of the lesson, the students used the same graph, but came up with their own ideas as to what the graph could be about. Some of them choose topics that were important to them (e.g., how much homework students got per grade) and others that were a little more worldly (e.g., the number of people in a union). Once they came up with their topic, they then came up with all of the key elements of the graph (title, lables, key, scale, etc.) and also created 3 questions that could be asked of their graph. One question was a true/false question, a second question was a multiple choice question (with 4 choices) and the final question was a more open question that could fall into a Level 3/level 4 range on a Q-Chart.

To consolidate the lesson Brian had the students look at all of their graphs and talk about what was similar and what was different. They also talked about what questions were easy to make, and about what questions were hard to make. They also talked about why the graph looked the way it did - and that it lent itself to going from smallest to biggest.