Math Monday: graphing

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 activity.  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.

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.

And if you’d like to use either one, just click on the picture and that will take you to the page to download.

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.

We did do some extension activities, of looking at which thing they had the most of, and what they had the least of.  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.

Head on over to Joyful Learner to see some more fun math ideas.