March 24, 2019
At the heart of it, graphing in the early years is about quantifying information in order to answer a question. That requires children to organize data in some visible way so that comparisons and generalizations are possible.
Ellen Stoll Walsh's book Mouse Count can be used in the classroom to cover such broad-ranging topics as data analysis, number sense, and number and operations. Key concepts such as estimation can be explored and investigated.
Data analysis uses math to make sense of the world. It is compiling information and describing it in a quantitative way: how many?
Do the children in your classroom know each other’s names? At winter break, are they still pointing to “that girl?” Doing activities in the early weeks of school that use the children’s own names will do wonders for building your classroom community. At the same time, you can be doing math—as well as literacy!
In this planning conversation, a teacher and coach discuss some of their ideas and concerns about a forthcoming lesson. With a coach, she discusses some of her ideas and concerns about the forthcoming lesson.
A student explains how his classroom's attendance chart is used.
This video from our Focus on the Lesson series demonstrates an activity for teaching capacity in kindergarten and preschool. Students look at two containers and try to determine which one would hold more liquid.
In this video, students brainstorm ways to sort their shoes. Later, they graphically organize the data from the sets they created.
Lyn English explains an exploratory method of teaching math. "The children's learning was extended beyond the curriculum because they discovered a lot of the mathematical ideas themselves."
Heather Duncan did a particularly striking job of explaining how she and her kindergartners at South Shore Elementary have made collecting data from surveys and discussing them a regular part of their classroom life.
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