Are your students getting bored of the same old math lesson day after day? It’s time to bring some graphing activities into their lives!
Graphing is a fun skill to work on because it allows many opportunities for student engagement.
Fortunately, there are many different ways for teachers to incorporate this into the classroom in a fun and engaging way.
Whether you’re looking for hands-on graphing activities or digital lessons, we’ve got plenty of great ideas that will get your students excited about graphing—so keep reading to learn some easy ways you can incorporate it into the school day!
Using Outside Time to Graph:
One of the most effortless and fun ways to teach graphing is to get your students outside!
Create line plots by having students do jumps on a sidewalk or grassy spot and then measure the jumps. Students can use the data to graph how many students were able to do each length.
To extend your lesson, have students write questions (with answers) about the data on their line plots.
Another outdoor graphing activity would be to have students count things they find outside such as leaves, rocks, insects, number of clouds, trees, etc… This is a perfect opportunity to create picture graphs.
Graphing Activities Using Snacks:
If you’re allowed to have snacks in your classroom, its always fun to graph with food! After all, what student doesn’t get excited for snack time?
You can use chex mix, skittle bags, m&ms, or lucky charms to graph how many of each snack was in your bag. To save money, ask parents to send in some snacks!
Graph Student Favorites:
This is an easy way to have students collect data. They can collect and graph data based on students’ favorite:
- Colors
- Animals
- Sports
- Shows
- Specials (music, p.e., art…)
- Subject (math, reading, science…)
Other Easy Ways to Incorporate Graphing Activities All Year:
Graph pre and post-assessment scores
If you use my Guided Math curriculums (Grades 1-5), you can use the student graphs to easily graph their pre and post-assessment scores.
It’s important to make sure your students understand what the purpose of a pre-assessment is so they do not get upset with themselves if they get a low score.
Put emphasis on post-assessment scores and most importantly, growth!
Graph fluency
Students love to see their progress. An easy way to do this is to do a one minute fluency drill with them each week and have them graph their progress on a fluency chart. I like to do this as part of my guided reading time once a week.
Graph the weather
In some states, this is part of science standards for certain grades.
But even if it isn’t, you can easily make a class graph with the types of weather that are common in your area.
With older students, you can create a temperature graph instead. (Each column could be a different temperature range…50s…60s…etc…)
Graph opinions
Most grade levels teach some form of opinion writing. You can integrate this writing standard with your math lessons by graphing students’ opinions.
Graph lunch data
If you have to submit a lunch count each day, you can create a simple graph (choice 1, choice 2, pbj) and then have a helper graph the lunch count.
Let me help you teach graphing and line plots! Check out these lessons for Grades 1-5!
