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This is the first time I had introduced graphs to the girls, so I needed it to be pretty easy. I decided to make a giant bar graph on the kitchen floor with painters tape. Then the girls could make the bars by separating the vehicles by type.
Supplies for Giant Graphing
- Painters Tape
- Variety of Toy Vehicles (or other small toys that can be sorted)
- Paper
- Markers
How to Make a Giant Toy Graph
Now I turned them loose to sort the cars. We had cars, planes, trucks, construction equipment, and for a while we had SUV's and vans separated. It ended up being too hard for the girls to tell the difference between some of the SUV's and vans though, so we combined them.
In fact, we actually didn't even have room for all the cars, so we just stopped sorting after we ran out of other vehicles.
Once we had them all the vehicles in lines, the girls counted the vehicles in each line. After they had successfully counted each line I started a graph for them and showed them how to fill out the bars.
Of course, since each tile was 5 cars, I could also have introduced skip counting if they had been a little older. Still practicing counting over 20 by ones though, so I just stuck with counting.
As soon as they finished the graph, they just wanted to drive the cars on the blue tape! Guess we will have to make some roads out of painters tape too!
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