Snack Graphing, beginner bar graphs

Hi! Future Ticia 2023 here, I’m updating this Snack Graphing post to not have absolutely terrible pictures (though they’re still not great), and actually have a printable you can use (hopefully provided I can find it from over 10 years ago). I now return you to past Ticia of 2011, I’ll occasionally pop back in with more comments.

We’ve done some graphing before, but not huge amounts.  Partially because our math curriculum doesn’t really cover graphing yet, and partially because I’m lazy. And laziness was the gestalt for this STEM activity, particularly math lesson.  Mainly, I didn’t want to fix the kids breakfast, and I remembered Phyllis over at All Things Beautiful writing a post about making snacks and using it to write a recipe.

(there are affiliate links in here)

Well, I knew my kids couldn’t write the recipe, so I made up a worksheet for them real fast.

And of course, right after I’d printed up our first recipe I realized that I hadn’t laid out those ingredients, so I made a second one.
No really, I made two different ones for this.  And even after we’d started I realized I’d forgotten to leave a place for M&M’s on the chart.

Snack Graphing Supplies

Printable (provided Future Ticia 2023 finds it, I did and updated it slightly, it’s on my subscriber page, join my newsletter)

Future Ticia 2023 is adding sarcastic comments in parantheses

Snack supplies: popcorn (I also love making air-popped popcorn), Cinnamon Toast Crunch, mini marshmallows (I guess most sugar cereals have this), jelly beans (what was I thinking), M&Ms (so much sugar), Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops (since I know we very rarely had most of these things in the house, how did we have all of these ingredients for this?)

Snack Graphing lesson

Before I let them have at it I set up a few ground rules.  Mainly you had to have at least one scoop of each item, and whenever you did the scoops you had to then make sure to color in one square for each scoop.  That took some demonstrating, because as I said I haven’t done as many graphs as I should have.

What followed was a frenzied few minutes of happily getting as much food as they could fit into those little bowls. Hmph, it won’t let me watermark the other one without messing up the picture.

And yes, that is Princess wearing a tank top in the middle of January, I bought it for her earlier this week thinking “summer clothes, that I can fiddle with,” and she’s refused to take it off since I bought it.  That girl……..

And they happily munched on their breakfast all through school that day.

Snack graphing extension activities

We did do some extension activities after our first quick lesson.

• What did you have the most of?
• What did you have the least of?
• What was the most common choice for everyone?
• Did any of the foods have the same number?

Superman kept pointing out that he had “no jelly beans, because I don’t like jelly beans.”  He was very worried about this, but was quite happy to eat the other food.

All in all, that was a great math lesson for my preschoolers.

More odd math lessons we’ve done

As a general rule, I don’t tend to do lots of math lessons on here. Our math lessons are rather boring, and it’s not where most of my creative ideas pop out. Especially once the kids got older and their math got more complex.

• Sunflower seed math
• Multiplication book
• Simple math counting game
• Math gameschooling
• Best Math website